FROM SKETCH-BOOK AND DIARY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
LETTERS FROM THE HOLY LAND

CONTAINING 16 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR FROM PAINTINGS BY THE AUTHOR

“Charmingly natural and spontaneous travel impressions with sixteen harmonious illustrations. The glow, spaciousness and atmosphere of these Eastern scenes are preserved in a way that eloquently attests the possibilities of the best colour process work.”—Outlook.

“The letters in themselves afford their own justification; the sketches are by Lady Butler, and when we have said that we have said all. Combined, they make a book that is at once a delight to the eye and a pleasure to handle. The coloured illustrations, marvellously well reproduced, provide in a panoramic display faithful representations of the Holy Land as it is seen to-day. They make a singularly attractive collection, worthy of the distinguished artist who painted them.”—St. James’s Gazette.

A. & C. BLACK, SOHO SQUARE LONDON

AGENTS

FROM SKETCH-BOOK
AND DIARY

BY
ELIZABETH BUTLER
WITH TWENTY-EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
AND TWENTY-ONE SMALL SKETCHES IN THE TEXT
BY THE AUTHOR

LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK, SOHO SQUARE, W.
BURNS AND OATES, 28 ORCHARD STREET, W.
1909

Dedication

TO MY SISTER, ALICE MEYNELL

I HAVE an idea of writing to you, most sympathetic Reader, of certain days and nights of my travels that have impressed themselves with peculiar force upon my memory, and that have mostly rolled by since you and I set out, at the Parting of the Ways, from the paternal roof-tree, within three months of each other.

First, I want to take you to the Wild West Land of Ireland, to a glen in Kerry, where, so far, the tourist does not come, and then on to remote Clew Bay, in the County Mayo.

After that, come with me up the Nile in the time that saw the close of the Gordon Relief Expedition, when the sailing “Dahabieh,” most fascinating of house-boats, was still the vogue for those who were not in a hurry, and when again the tourist (of that particular year) was away seeking safer picnic grounds elsewhere.

Then to the Cape and the voyage thither, which may not sound alluring, but where you may find something to smile at.

I claim your indulgence, wherever I ask you to accompany me, for my painter’s literary crudities; but nowhere do I need it more than in Italy, for you have trodden that field with me almost foot by foot. The veil to which I trust for softening those asperities elsewhere must fall asunder there.

I have made my Diary, and in the case of the Egyptian chapters, my letters to our mother, the mainsprings from which to draw these reminiscences.

BANSHA CASTLE, July 1909.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I
IN THE WEST OF IRELAND

CHAPTER I
GLENARAGH

MY diary must introduce you to Glenaragh, where I saw a land whose beauty was a revelation to me; a new delight unlike anything I had seen in my experiences of the world’s loveliness. To one familiarized from childhood with Italy’s peculiar charm, a sudden vision of the Wild West of Ireland produces a sensation of freshness and surprise difficult adequately to describe.

“—June ‘77.—At Killarney we left the train and set off on one of the most enchanting carriage journeys I have ever made, passing by the lovely Lough Leane by a road hedged in on both sides with masses of the richest May blossom. For some distance the scenery was wooded and soft, almost too perfect in composition of wood, lake, river, and mountain; but by degrees we left behind us those scenes of finished beauty, and entered upon tracts of glorious bog-land which, in the advancing evening, impressed me beyond even my heart’s desire by their breadth of colour and solemn tones. I was beginning to taste the salt of the Wilds.

“The scenery grew more rugged still, and against ranges of distant mountains jutted out the strong grey and brown rocks, the stone cairns and cabins of the Wild West land.

“To be a figure-painter and full of interest in mankind does not mean that one cannot enjoy, from the depths of one’s heart, such scenes as these, where what human habitations there are, are so like the stone heaps that lie over the face of the land that they are scarcely distinguishable from them. When observed they only convey to the mind the sense of the feebleness of man, overpowered as he is here by the might of the primeval landscape. This human atom stands timidly at his black cabin door to see the stranger pass, often half-witted through privation; or he silently tills the little patch of land he has borrowed from the strong and barbarous earth that yields him so little.

“The mighty ‘Carran Thual,’ one of the mountain group which rises out of Glenaragh and dominates the whole land of Kerry, was ablaze with burning heather, its peak sending up a glorious column of smoke which spread out at the top for miles and miles and changed its exquisite smoke tints every minute as the sun sank lower. As we reached the rocky pass that took us by the wild and remote Lough Acoose that sun had gone down behind an opposite mountain, and the blazing heather glowed brighter as the twilight deepened, and circles of fire played fiercely and weirdly on the mountain-side. Our Glen gave the ‘Saxon lady’ its grandest illumination on her arrival.

“Wild strange birds rose from the bracken as we passed, and flew strongly away over lake and mountain torrent, and the little black Kerry cows all watched us go by with ears pricked and heads inquiringly raised. The last stage of the journey had a brilliant finale. A herd of young horses was in our way in the narrow road, and the creatures careered before us, unable or too stupid to turn aside into the ditches by the roadside to let us through. We could not head them, and for fully a mile did those shaggy wild things caper and jump ahead, their manes flying out wildly with the glow from the west shining through them. Some imbecile cows soon joined them in the stampede, for no imaginable reason, unless they enjoyed the fright of being pursued, and the ungainly progress of those recruits was a sight to behold,—tails in the air and horns in the dust. The troop led the way right into the eye of the sunset. With this escort we entered Glenaragh.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“—June 1877.—We rode in to-night after a long excursion amidst the mountains of this wild land of Kerry, rode down into the glen where our little inn stands in a clump of birch and arbutus trees. That northern light which in these high latitudes and at this season carries the after-light of the sunset on into the dawn, lighted our path for the last hour with surprising power. Were we sufficiently far north, of course, the sun itself would not dip below the horizon at all, but here we have only the upper portion of his aureole from his setting to his rising. Oh! the wild freedom of these mountain paths, the scent of the cabin turf fires, the round west wind rolling through the heather; what cool wells of memories they fill up for the thirsty traveller in desert places far away. That west wind! This is the first land it has swept with its wings since it left the coasts of Labrador. For purity, for freshness, for generosity, give me the Wild West wind of Ireland.

“‘Carran Thual’ is still on fire; it signals each night back to the northern light across the glen in a red glare of burning heather. The moon, now in her first quarter, looks green-gold by contrast with all this red of sky and flame, and altogether our glen gives us, these nights, such a display of earthly and heavenly splendour that it seems one should be a spectator all night of so much beauty. And to this concert of colour runs the subtle accompaniment of rushing water, for all these mountains are laced with silvery torrents leaping down to the lakes and rivers that reflect the glory of the sky. Glenaragh! loveliest of wild valleys, where is the poet that should make thee the theme of his songs?

“Coming through ‘Windy Gap’ in this illuminated gloaming we met a lonely horseman riding fast, a rope for his bridle, his pony very shaggy. He passed us over the rocks and rolling stones, and, looking back, we saw his bent figure jet black against the west for a moment, ere he dipped down through the ‘Gap’ out of sight. We knew who he was. Some peasant was dying on the mountain-side beyond, and the priest was anxious to be in time with the Viaticum.

“A strange little creature came out of the kitchen of the inn to see us after supper, and I made the acquaintance of a Leprechaun. Tiny, grey, bald little manikin; a ‘fairy,’ the people call him. I do not want to know why they are like that. I would rather leave them mysterious and unexplained.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“The people speak Gaelic here, amongst themselves, and the priest preaches in it in the little chapel with the mud floor up on the hill over the torrent. The language and the torrent seem to speak alike, hurrying headlong.

“But the chapel! Shall I ever forget the tub of holy water, on my first Sunday, placed before the rickety little altar on the mud floor, where the people, on coming in, splashed the water up into their faces? The old women had all brought big bottles from their homes in far-away glens to fill at the tub, and nothing could surpass the comicality of their attitudes as they stooped over their pious business, all wearing the hooded cloak that made them look as broad as they were long. One old lady, in her nice white cap, monopolized the tub an unconscionably long time, for, catching sight of her wind-tossed tresses in that looking-glass, she finished her devout ablutions by smoothing her few grey hairs with her moistened fingers into tidy bands, with alternate signs of the cross. The windows were all broken, and the men and boys stuffed the holes with their hats and caps to keep out the mountain blast.

“Last Sunday, a very hot day, the tub happened to be placed outside the door, and it was well my horse was not tied up within reach, or a former catastrophe might have been repeated, and a ‘blessed baist’ have carried me home. The heat in the rickety little gallery, where the ‘quality’ have their seats, was such that I went out into the open air and followed the rest of the service with a rock for my hassock, and two rosy pigs toddling about me in that friendly way I notice as characteristic of all the animals in these parts. They seem to feel they are members of the family, and you see calves, goats, pigs, and donkeys sauntering in and out of the cabin doors in a free-and-easy harmony with the human beings which takes my fancy greatly. But the beasts are by far the happiest; their lives seem passed in perfect contentment and satisfaction, whereas the poor human animals have a hard struggle for existence in this stony and difficult land of Kerry.

“The other day when W. and I dismounted at a cabin door on a wild mountain that holds, still higher up, a little dark lake which the people declare has no bottom to it, and on the shores of which ‘worms as big as a horse’ come out and bellow in the evenings, the gaunt pig that seemed to act watch-dog charged at me like a wild boar and sent me home in ‘looped and windowed raggedness.’ I never thought to find excess of zeal in a pig! The inmates of the cabin could not do enough for us to make up for such want of reticence.

“On one occasion at church in Tipperary, I noticed a rather satanic goat come pattering up the church and occupy an empty pew, where he lay down with perfect self-complacency and remained quiescent, chewing the cud, while we knelt; but each time the congregation stood up, up jumped the goat, his pale eyes and enormous horns just appearing over the high front of the pew. Then as we knelt again he would subside also, till he was startled to his feet once more by the rustle of the people rising, and then his wild head was again visible over the top of the pew, staring about him. Not a single person took any notice of the weird creature or seemed to think him out of place or at all funny. And so he continued to rise and fall with the rest to the end.

“Our chapel here is too small for the congregation that streams in from places as far as fifteen miles away among the mountains, and on one pouring wet Sunday I saw the strangest rendering of what is called ‘a chapel-of-ease.’ Not much ‘ease’ there, for some dozen men and youths who could find no place inside were kneeling about the door in running water, with a stone placed under each knee. Every day I see some incident or episode which has for me a surprise and all the charm of a new and striking experience. I feel more ‘abroad’ in this country than I do on the Continent.

“See, again, this little scene. A friend journeying to our inn and missing the road got belated in the defiles of the ‘Reeks.’ Dismounting at one of those mud cabins, which, at a little distance, are indistinguishable from their rocky surroundings, to ask the way, he was invited inside and offered a meal. The light was waning, so two little girls stood on either side of the stranger, each holding a bit of lighted candle as he sat at table. These wild-eyed and ragged little creatures made a pretty pair of dining-table candlesticks! I wish I could have seen them in the dim twilight of the black, smoke-dimmed cabin interior, their faces lighted by the candle flame.

“The beauty of the children here is a constant pleasure to me. We are here in the land of blue eyes and black lashes, or golden ones, when the hair, as it so frequently is, is ruddy. The young women are quite beautiful. I wish a painter of female beauty could have seen the girl we passed to-day who was minding some calves in a bit of bog-land bordered with birch-trees. It was a symphony of green; her head shawl was green plaid, her petticoat another tone of green, the background and all her surroundings gave every cool and delicious variation of green, and her ruddy limbs and red-gold hair, tossed by the breeze and shone through by the sun, looked richer in colour by the contrast. Her great blue eyes looked shyly at us and the shawl soon covered her laughing face. What a sweet picture, ‘In the Green Isle’!

“Every day I am more and more struck with the light-heartedness and gaiety of the animals. Whether it is emphasized by the poverty-stricken and quiet, saddened, demeanour of the human beings in these parts I cannot tell, but certainly the beasts seem to have the best of it. As to the dogs that belong to the mud cabins, never have I seen such jolly dogs, full of comic ways, especially when in puppy-hood, and all so valiant in confronting us as we near their strongholds. But on our near approach that puppy who looks mighty fierce afar off usually bolts under some door and sticks there. Then the pigs, who generally are less valiant than our wild boar of Lough Cluen, seized with apparent panic, rush round and round in the yard, and the flurried ducks that scuttle from under our horses’ hoofs end by falling on their sides in the ditches—surely all in fun? And invariably the cows and calves by the way-side prefer to be pursued along the roads, and keep up a splendid burst of galloping with tails in the air for miles before a tumble happening to one of them suggests a movement to the rear. All the lower creatures are ‘jolly dogs’ here, and only man is care-worn.”

In the autumn we came back to our well-loved glen, and I gathered materials there for my first married Academy picture—the ‘Recruits for the Connaught Rangers.’ W. found me two splendid ‘bog-trotters’ for models. The elder of the two had the finer physique, and it was explained to me that this was owing to his having been reared on herrings as well as potatoes, whereas the other, who lived up in the mountains, away from the sea, had not known the luxury of the herring. I wish we could get more of these men into our army. W. at that time was developing suggestions for forming a Regiment of Irish Guards, and I was enthusiastic in my adhesion to such a project and filling the imaginary ranks with big men like my two models. However, he was some twenty-three years too soon, and the honour had to be won for Ireland through yet another big war.

CHAPTER II
COUNTY MAYO IN 1905

I WISH you would make a summer tour to Mayo. It is simple; yet what a change of scene, of sensations, of thoughts one secures by this simple and direct journey—Euston, Holyhead, Dublin, Mulranny. You travel right across Ireland, getting a very informing vista of the poverty and stagnation of those Midland counties till your eyes greet the glorious development of natural beauty on the confines of the sea-girt Western land. I went there tired from London and came on a scene of the most perfect repose imaginable, with the sound of the motor buses still buzzing in my ears.

Mulranny is supremely healthy—a place of rosy cheeks and sunburn, bracing yet genial, clear-aired, majestic in its scenery, unspoilt. As you near your journey’s end and enter Mayo the change in the scenery from the emptiness of Roscommon develops rapidly. Magnificent mountains rise on the horizon, and the grandeur of the landscape grows into extraordinary beauty as the train rounds into Clew Bay. The great cone of Croagh Patrick rises in striking isolation at first, and then the surrounding mountains, one by one, join it in lovely outlines against the fresh clean sky. It was a beautiful afternoon when I was introduced to this memorable landscape, and the waters of the Bay were quite calm. After sunset the crescent moon gave the culminating charm to the lovely scene in the west, while to the south the red planet Mars flamed above Croagh Patrick, and all this beauty was mirrored in the Bay. What an emancipation from the fret and fuss of little Piccadilly in a hot July to find oneself before these mountain forms and colours that have not changed since the cooling of the earth. You might travel farther a great way and not find such a virgin land.

And there is Achill Island, a one-day’s excursion from Mulranny, poignantly melancholy in its beauty and remoteness beyond anything I have seen in the west. Achill has often been described; it holds the traveller’s attention with a wild appeal to his heart; but I don’t know that one little detail of that land “beyond the beyond” has ever been described. It is Achill’s mournful little Pompeii, a village of the dead, on a bare hillside, which we passed one day on our way to an unfrequented part of the island. This village was deserted in the awful famine year of ‘47, some of the inhabitants creeping away in fruitless search of work and food to die farther afield, others simply sinking down on the home sod that could give them nothing but the grave. In the bright sunshine its roofless cabins and grass-grown streets looked more heart-breaking than they might have done in dismal rain. I wish I could have made a sketch of it as I saw it that day—a subject strongly attracting the attention of the mind rather than the eye. Pictorial beauty there was none.

Everywhere in this country there is that heart-piercing contrast between natural beauty and human adversity—that companionship of sun and sorrow. But the light and the darkness seem blended by the unquestioning faith of these rugged Christians into a solemn unity and harmony before which any words of mine sound only like so much dilettantism.

See here another bit of chapel interior. A rough, plain little building, too formless to be picturesque, packed with peasant men, women, and children. Where but in Ireland could such a scene take place as I witnessed there? The priest, before the beginning of the service, gave a tremendous swish of holy water to the congregation with a mop out of a zinc pail, from the altar. He had previously heard nearly half the congregation’s confessions, men, women, boys, and girls kneeling in turn beside his chair at one side of the altar, without any sort of screen. I wondered, as they pressed round him, that they did not overhear each other, but indeed I reflected that would be “no matther whativer,” as these people must have but little to tell!

The server ran a match along the earthen floor to light the two guttering, unequal candles on the altar, and at the end of Mass he produced the mop and zinc pail again. Swish went the holy water once more from the mop, wielded by the athletic sword-arm of the gigantic young priest. For fear the nearer people should have been but poorly sprinkled under that far-reaching arc of water, which went to the very end wall of the chapel, he soused the mop again with a good twist and gave everybody in the front benches a sharp whack full in their faces, tactfully leaving us out. They received it with beaming and grateful smiles.

There are wonderful studies of old men’s and women’s heads here full of that character which in the more “educated” parts of Ireland the School Board seems to be rubbing out, and I was delighted to see the women and girls wearing the head-shawls and white caps and the red petticoats that charmed me in Kerry in ‘77. The railway is sure to bring the dreadful “Frenchy” hat here in time, and then good-bye to the comely appearance of these women. Their wild beauty undergoes an extraordinary change under the absurd hat and feathers—these winsome colleens then lose all their charm.

Yet I must thank this same railway for having brought us to this haven of rest, right up to the doors of a charming, very modern hotel, on quite different lines from the dear little inn that fascinated me in the old Glenaragh days. In its way it is fascinating too, for here you have all the up-to-date amenities in the very heart of the wildest country you could wish for. The electric light is generated by the mountain streams and the baths filled from the glorious bay that lies below the hotel terraces, a never-failing delight in all its moods of sun and shadow, wind and calm.

Sad it is to see so many cabins deserted. The strength of the country is ebbing away. The few people that are left are nice and wholesome in mind and manner; they have the quiet urbanity of the true peasant all the world over. They remind me of the Tuscan in this particular, but, of course, they have not his light-heartedness. More seriousness, I should think, these Irish have. I was sketching sheep, for a contemplated picture, in the evenings on the lovely marshes by the sea, and one evening a widow, left completely lonely in her little cabin on the heights above by the departure for America of her last child, came down to fetch home her solitary sheep from amongst the others, and I told her I thought these creatures were leading a very happy life. “Yes,” she answered, pausing for a moment and looking down on the flock, “and they are without sin.”

At the ringing of the Angelus the work in the fields, the bogs, the potato patches stops till the words of St. Luke’s Gospel have been repeated, just as we remember them said in Italy. It was a surprise—and one of great interest to me—when I first saw peasants saying the Angelus under a northern sky.

My studies of the wild mountain sheep on the marshes came to an abrupt close. I was reposing under a rock (it was well on in July) with palette and panels ready, waiting for the sunset and its after-glow, to get final precious notes of colour upon the fleeces. One particular sheep had been a very useful model. It ambled in a graceful way on three legs and we called it “Pacer.” I became aware of an opaque body rising between my closed eyes and the sun, and looking up I beheld the head of “Pacer” peering at me over the edge of the rock over my head. But what had happened to “Pacer’s” neck? Good gracious! I jumped up and beheld a shorn “Pacer” and all the flock in the same lamentable condition. It had all happened in twenty-four hours.

I want to bring before your mind two little rocky islands with green summits off the coast of Clare, not far from here. Of all the wind-swept little islands none could be more wind-swept. On one, the smallest, I heard that a ferocious and unmanageable billy-goat was deposited as a useless member of the community, and one night he was blown out to sea—a good riddance. On the other you perceive, through the spray, little nodules on the turf—the graves of unbaptized infants. And the sea-gulls along the cliffs are for ever crying like legions of children.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

By returning from Mulranny by way of Tipperary and the Rosslare route to England you can voyage down the Shannon and have an experience not lightly to be foregone. This is the “lordly Shannon,” a great wide, slowly-flowing and majestic river of dark, clear, bluish water—blue shot with slate. You sit at the bows of the little steamboat which takes you from Athlone to Killaloe, so that neither smoke nor screw interferes with your enjoyment of the lovely scenes you are to pass through. If the time is July (the time to choose) you are at once greeted on clearing the little grey town of Athlone with the most exquisite scent from the level banks which form two wide belts of creamy meadow-sweet all the way to the end, at Lough Derg. These belts are interrupted, once only, by the lock at Shannon Bridge, that little gathering of houses and gaunt dismantled barracks and breastworks built in the days of the threatened French invasion. Near here lived Charlotte Brontë’s husband till his death only the other day.

You will see in the Shannon a mighty waterway for commerce, left to the wild things that haunt it; and it has haunted me ever since that July day on which I saw it with a sense of regret that the condition of Ireland makes such a river out of scale with the requirements of the country. It flows for the wild birds, the cattle, the fishes, and for its own pleasure; and it flowed for mine that day, for I let no phase of it escape me and gladly added its sonorous name to the long list of those of the great rivers of the world I have already seen.

We hardly saw a soul along the banks, but many kinds of aquatic birds, flying, diving, and swimming, enlivened the voyage with their funny ways, scurrying out of the track of the puffing little steamer. Along the whole course of the great stream there stood at regular intervals, planted in more hopeful days, navigation posts, marking the channel for the ships that never come, and on these scarlet signs perched black cormorants eyeing us like vultures. The herons rose slowly from the meadow-sweet and the sedges, with their long flapping wings; the cattle standing in the water followed us with their mild eyes. It was all beautiful, mournful, eloquent, and when the ruins of Clonmacnoise hove in sight I heard the spirit of Ireland speaking to me from the grave.

Clonmacnoise! A mere curious name to us in England. Perhaps nowhere, even in depopulated Ireland, can a more desolate, abandoned plot of land than this be seen. And yet this great monastery and university, founded in A.D. 544, and at the height of her renown in the eighth century while our country was in a very immature state, was a European centre to which scholars on the Continent came to study; which was quoted and referred to by them as a conspicuous authority, and which for long was in what I might call brisk communication with the centres of learning abroad, if “brisk” was not too bizarre a word in such a place to-day. A more mournful oblivion never fell on any once flourishing centre of active thought and teaching.

The slow havoc of time amongst these seven remaining little churches and blunt round towers was one day accelerated by Cromwell’s gunpowder, which has left the “Guest House” of the monastery a heap of ruins split into ugly shapes quite out of keeping with the rest.

As the grey group passed away from sight I thought I had never known more eloquent silence than that which enfolds the ruins bearing the sounding name of Clonmacnoise.

Will the electric chain ever be linked up again that carried Ireland’s intellect and mental energy to the Continent in those remote times, and round again from the great sources of learning there, with fresh material to enrich her own store?

You will have the wish to “Come back to Erin, Mavourneen,” after making this little tour. To me Ireland is very appealing, though I owe her a grudge for being so tantalizing and evasive for the painter. The low clouds of her skies cause such rapid changes of sun and shadow over her landscapes that it requires feats of technical agility to catch them on the wing beyond my landscape powers. My only chance is to have unlimited time and thus be able to wait a week, if necessary, for the particular effect to come round again. An artist I heard of thought he had “bested” the Irish weather and its wiles when he set up this clever system: six canvasses he spread out before him on the ground in a row, each with a given arrangement of light and shade sketched out ready. But when the psychological moment arrived he was so flurried, that while he was wildly running his hand up and down the row of canvasses for the right one he could never find it in time.

A nice dance you are led, sketching in Ireland, altogether! You are, for instance, intent on dashing down the plum-like tones of a distant mountain, when lo! that mountain which in its purple mystery seemed some fifteen miles away, in a moment flashes out into such vivid green that, as the saying is here, “you might shake hands with it,” so close has it come. Even its shape is changed, for peaks and buttresses start forth in the sunburst where you imagined unbroken slopes a few minutes before. Shadowed woods spring into dark prominence by the sudden illumination of the fields behind them and as suddenly are engulfed in the golden haze of a shaft of light that pierces the very clouds whose shadows had a minute before given them such a startling prominence on the light background. Unsuspected lovelinesses leap forth while those we saw before are snatched away, and the sunlight for ever wanders up and along the mountain sides, as some one has finely said, “like the light from a heavenly lantern.”

What those changes from beauty to beauty do towards sunset I leave you to imagine. I have never seen Ireland at all worthily painted. I think we ought to leave her to her poets and to the composers of her matchless music.

II
EGYPT

CHAPTER I
CAIRO

TO the East! What a thrill of pleasure those words caused me when they meant that I was really off for Egypt. The East has always had for me an intense fascination, and it is one of the happiest circumstances of my life that I should have had so much enjoyment of it.

My childish sketch-books, as you remember, are full of it, and so are my earliest scribblings. To see the reality of my fervid imaginings, therefore, was to satisfy in an exquisite way the longing of all my life.

The Gordon expedition was my opportunity, and it was a bold and happy conception of W.’s that of my going out with the two eldest little ones to join him on the Nile when the war should be over. I may say I—and the British Army—had the Nile pretty well to ourselves, for few tourists went up the year I was there. But I had to wait some time at Cairo and at Luxor before all trouble had been put an end to by the battle of Ginniss, which closed the recrudescence of rebellion that burst out after the great Khartoum campaign.

The emotion on seeing the East for the first time can never be felt again. The surprise can never be repeated, and holds a type of pleasure different from that which one feels on revisiting it, as I have so often done since.

One knows the “gorgeous East” at first only in pictures; one takes it on trust from Delacroix, Decamps, Gérôme, Müller, Lewis, and a host of others. You arrive, and their pictures suddenly become breathing realities, and in time you learn, with exquisite pleasure, that their most brilliant effects and groups are no flights of fancy but faithful transcripts of every-day reality.

But at first you ask, “Can those figures in robes and turbans be really going about on ordinary business? Are they bringing on that string of enormous camels to carry real hay down that crowded alley; are those bundles in black and in white wrappers, astride of white asses caparisoned in blue and silver, merely matter-of-fact ladies of the harem taking their usual exercise? That Pasha’s curvetting white Arab horse’s tail is dyed a tawny red, and what is this cinder-coloured, bare-headed, jibbering apparition, running along, clothed in rattling strings of sea-shells and foaming at the mouth? A real fanatic? That water-seller by Gérôme has moved; he is selling a cup of water to that gigantic negro in the white robe and yellow slippers, and is pocketing the money quite in an ordinary way. And there is a praying man by Müller, not arrested in mid-prayer, but going through all the periods with the prescribed gestures, his face to the East, and the declining sun adding an ever-deepening flush to the back of his amber-coloured robe.”

It takes two or three days to rid oneself of the idea that the streets are parading their colours and movement and their endless variety of Oriental types and costumes for your diversion only, on an open-air stage.

Cairo in ‘85, ‘86, was only at the beginning of its mutilations by occidentalism, and the Oriental cachet was dominant still. To sit on the low shady terrace of the old Shepheard’s hotel under the acacias and watch the pageant of the street below was to me an endless delight.

The very incongruity of the drama unrolling itself before one’s eyes had a charm of its own. Look at that Khedivial officer in sky-blue, jerkily riding his pretty circus Arab. There follows him a majestic and most genuine Bedouin in camel’s hair burnoos, deigning not the turn of an eyelash as he passes our frivolous throng on the terrace; two Greek priests, their long hair gathered up in knots under the tall black cap and flowing veil, equal him in quiet dignity, and a mendicant friar rattles his little money-box, like an echo of the water-seller’s cups over the way, as a hint to our charity. An Anglo-Indian officer of high degree is driven up to our steps in a ‘bus under a pile of baggage. He has just arrived from India and is impressively escorted by various Sikhs, whose immense puggarees are conceived in a totally different spirit from that of the native turbans. A British hussar, smart as only a British soldier can be, trots by on a wiry Syrian horse; a cab full of Highlanders out for a spree bumps along the unpaved roadway. I confess I was disappointed with the effect of our honoured British red. What did it look like where the red worn by the natives was always of the most harmonious tones!

See that string of little donkeys cheerily toddling along, all but extinguished under their loads of sugar-canes that sweep the ground with their long leaves; humble peasant donkeys, meeting a flashing brougham with windows rigidly closed, through which the almond eyes of veiled ladies of some high Pasha’s harem glance up at us and take us all in in that devouring sweep of vision. Double syces run before such equipages.

French bugles tell us an Egyptian regiment is coming, and, meeting it, will go by with a dull rumble a string of English baggage-waggons drawn by mules and driven by Nubians, escorted by British soldiers in dusty khaki uniforms; stout fellows going to the front, a good many of them to stay there—under the sand.

About 5.30 P.M. weird music and flaring torches brings us out again on the terrace, and we see a tumultuous crowd of pilgrims just arrived from Mecca by the five o’clock Suez train. They gather the crowd by their unearthly din and sweep it along with them. Beggars, flower-sellers, snake-charmers, tourists, and touts are all rolling along in a continuous buzz of various noises. Perhaps the full escort of cavalry jingles past our point of observation and the native crowd salutes the Khedive. Not so the British officers on the terrace, who keep their seats.

But what was all this to diving into the old city, and in a ten minutes’ donkey ride to find oneself in the Middle Ages; in the real, breathing, moving, sounding life of the Arabian Nights? Then when inclined to come back to our time and its comforts, which I am far from despising, ten minutes’ return ride and the glimpse into the old life of the East became as a vision. For what I call the pageant of the street in front of Shepheard’s was much too much mixed with modernity to allow of so complete a transformation of ideas.

The bazaars of Cairo have been painted and written about more than those of any other Oriental city. The idea of my having “a try” at them seems to come a little late! But if it is true that, as some croakers say, Old Cairo is gradually dying, I feel impelled to lay one flower of appreciation beside the grave which is ere long to close.

What a treat, to put it in that way, it was to rove about in the reality of the true East, to meet beauty of form and colour and light and shade and movement wherever one’s eyes turned, without being brought up with a nasty jar by some modern hideosity or other. This was contentment. You know what a bit of colour in sun or luminous shade does for me. Think of my feelings when I walked through the narrow streets where the rays of the sun slanted down through gaps in the masonry, or, as in some, through chinks in the overhead matting—now on a white turban, now on a rose-coloured robe relieved against the rich dark background of some cavernous open doorway, now on a bit of brass-work. The soft tones of the famous Carpet Bazaar in noon-day twilight, with that richness of colour that tells you the invisible sunshine is somewhere, fulfilled—yea, over-filled—my expectations, and close by in real working trim were the brass-workers tinkering and tapping musically, the while smoking their hubble-bubbles in very truth. The goldsmiths, in their own particular alley, were sitting in the rich chiaroscuro of their little shops waiting for me.

Added to those feasts for the eyes were the sounds which pictures could not give me—the warning shouts of the donkey-and camel-drivers, the “by your leave” in Arabic, followed by the shuffling sound of hoof and foot in the soft tan; the tinkling of the water-sellers’ brass saucers; the cries, like wild songs in the minor, of hawkers of all kinds of things. Then the scents, also unpaintable. Incense, gums, tan, ripe fruit, wood-smoke. And the smells? Ah, yes, well—the smells, goaty and otherwise. They were all bound up together in that entirety which I would not have deleted.

There was one particular angle of street in front of I forget what ripe old mosque, before which I would have liked to establish myself all day. The two streams of passers-by, human and animal, ceaselessly jostling each other, came at one particular hour into a shaft of sunlight just at the turn where I could see them in perspective. Now a splendid figure in yellow robe and white turban, accentuating the streak of gold to perfection, occupied the centre of the composition and I would make a mental note: “daffodil yellow and white in intense sunlight; dull crimson curtain in shade behind; man in half-shade in dark brown, boy in indigo in reflected light”—when in the shaft of light now appeared a snow-white robe and rosy turban, putting out the preceding scheme, till a hadji in a turban of soft bluey-green and pale-blue drapery came to suggest a very delicate emphasis to the rich and subdued surroundings.

In the first fresh days how mysterious these covered streets appear, these indoor thoroughfares, muffled with tan, where towering camels and shuffling donkeys and curvetting horses seem so astonishingly out of place.

Anglo-Egyptians who have to live in Cairo smile at my enthusiasm, and tell me they get tired of all this in time, and they are certainly helping to attenuate the charm. A late high official, on leaving Egypt, in his farewell speech told his audience that that day had been the happiest in his life, for he had seen the first “sandwich man” in the streets of Cairo. Since then another charming form of advertisement from the go-ahead West has appeared over the minarets of the alcohol-abhorring Moslems—a “sky sign” flashing out against the stars the excellence of somebody’s whisky. Can they now say “the changeless East”? And what a whirlpool of intensely Western amusements you may be sucked into if you are not wary. You may hide in the bazaars but you cannot live there, and teas, gymkanas, dances, and dinners will claim you for their own as though you were at Monte Carlo or still nearer home. In fact I have found New Cairo a little London and Monte Carlo rolled into one.

One glimpse of the vanishing Past which I got on a certain Friday at Cairo has left a queer impression on my mind, not at all a happy one. I am told the howling and dancing Dervishes have been lately suppressed, and I am dubious as to the fitness of us Christians being witnesses of those performances. However, I went, and saw what one can no longer see in Cairo. I found it difficult to believe those men were in real earnest, otherwise I should have felt more painfully impressed, but even as it was it was a disagreeable sight to witness the frenzied creatures flinging themselves backwards and forwards in time with the ever-increasing rapidity of the tom-toms till their long hair swept the floor at one moment and flew up straight on end towards the great vaulted interior of the mosque the next. Gasping shouts as of dying men escaped them rhythmically, and when the bewildering music had reached its climax it stopped, and so did they, and the priest, with gestures of loving commiseration and encouragement, very gracefully fell on their necks and gave them a drink of water each in turn. All this went on in a faint light from the hanging lamps, and the heat became suffocating. Mrs. C. put her hand on my shoulder, and pointing upwards asked me, “What is that?” A little white figure had appeared on a ledge high up under the drum of the dome. Whether man, woman, monkey, or goblin, I never saw a more impish figure, and it squatted there looking down from under its hood. I saw many very queer beings in Egypt as time went on, and decidedly the British occupation has not exorcised all the old magic of the Egyptians. But I have never played with it as some do. Not from fear, but from dislike. I am told in sober truth, people who came to scoff have begged to be let go when spell-bound with horror at what they have seen in a drop of enchanted ink spilled on a table.

We have sometimes played tricks on those people with imitation magic, but never more successfully than did our friend Sir James Dormer out in the Great Desert, when he struck the Bedouins dumb by taking out his glass eye, which they, of course, believed to be his own, tossing it in the air, and replacing it. He had great power over them, I should say, for ever after. Brave man, he was killed shortly after in India by the wild animal he had wounded and who sprang on him on his blind side. I think a man with a single eye is doubly brave who goes out tiger-shooting in the jungle.

A much wholesomer diversion than the Dervishes was provided by the then General in command at Cairo a few days later, when some three hundred of the Native Camel Corps were put through a series of splendid manœuvres out in the great open spaces of Abassieh, beyond the Tombs of the Mameluks. I got out of the carriage when warned that the final charge was about to be delivered, and stood so as to see them coming nearly “stem on.” It was a sight worth seeing, and surprising to me, who, before I landed, had never seen a camel worthy of the name. When the “halt!” was sounded, down fell the three hundred bellowing creatures on their knees in mid-career, close up to us, and the panting riders leapt off, their accoutrements in most admired disorder, and their puttees for the most part streaming along the ground. I was in a hurry to get back to Shepheard’s to take the impression down, for I was greatly struck by so novel a sight. The red morocco-leather saddle covers were most effective, and very sorry I was on my next visit to Egypt to find they had gone the way of all “effective” bits of military equipment, and were replaced by dull brown substitutes. Henceforth I was an enthusiastic admirer of that most picturesque of animals, and though I approached the camel at first with diffidence and apprehension, I soon found him much easier to draw than the horse. What you would like to do with a horse to give him movement and action, but mustn’t, you may do with a camel. You can twist his neck almost indefinitely and brandish his great coarse head as you like, and his long legs give you carte-blanche for producing speed. I found out a curious fact as time went on and I had dogged dozens of camels about the desert and made orderlies walk them up and down for me—namely, that the camel moves his legs in the walk precisely like the horse, but when he falls into a trot he moves the legs of the same side forward together. He walks like a horse and trots like a camel! As to the gallop, a more dislocating performance I never saw. Lady —— once told me she had, by an unlucky chance, got on a baggage camel with a hard mouth, or rather nose, and it ran away with her in the wide, wide desert. She hauled in the nose rope with the strength of despair, till the detestable animal’s face was twisted back taut into her lap and was looking at her, and still the body galloped forward without the remotest check. She artistically left the end of the adventure untold.

As to the camel’s noises, I don’t think I ever got to the end of them. The snarl and the grunt I was prepared for—the horrible querulous and sickening sound that some one has likened to the roar of a lion and the grunt of a pig combined; but one day, as I was making a study of one of these ungracious creatures for a big picture, I thought I heard a sweet lark warbling somewhere, and I marvelled at its presence over the Egyptian desert. The warblings came from the camel’s throat, and there was a look in his eye that seemed to warn me that he considered the sitting had lasted long enough. The length of his neck suggested that I was within measurable distance of a bite, and I dismissed my sitter and his lanky rider with promptitude.

Of all the figures that delighted me in Cairo those of the syces soon became first favourites. The dress, the springing run, the beauty of the movements—I don’t think the human figure could be more charmingly shown off. The English General’s syces alone wear the scarlet jacket, and deep indigo blue or maroon are the usual colours for the liveries of those mercuries. Our fast-trotting horses now try them too much, and we don’t let them run very far, but take them up after a little while. They were intended to trot before the ambling horses or donkeys of Pashas, to clear the way with shouts and sticks through the crowded bazaars. I saw a lady (alas!) driving a very fast English horse past Shepheard’s in a rakish T-cart, and the unfortunate syce was constantly on the point of being knocked down by the high-stepper. It did not add to the smartness of this turn-out to see this panting creature looking over his shoulder every minute in terror of the horse, and sometimes, when flagging in his run, being overtaken and having to run alongside. I levelled mental epithets at the thoughtless driver, and wondered how such a thing could be. Some of us are curiously inconsiderate. I am afraid she was but a type of many. Witness the suffering horses bitted up with tight bearing-reins standing for hours outside shops and smart houses where “at homes” are going on, when a word from the fair owners to their ignorant coachmen might procure ease for their miserable beasts. I am not enthusiastic about motors, but I am thankful for the fact that they are greatly reducing the sufferings of our poor “gees.” I hope by and by the motor will be made noiseless and odourless, for at present I cannot enjoy its country driving. The scents of the country are replaced by smell and the sounds by noise.

You are better friends with the motor than I am, and have gathered much advantage from its audacity in taking you up, for instance, such rugged heights as those about Tivoli, well within a morning’s outing from Rome, which I have looked at as inaccessible, and only to be admired from a lowly distance; those remote cones crowned with mediæval towns that figure in the backgrounds of many an “Adoration of the Magi” and “Flight into Egypt.”

I am, like you, of two minds about very rapid travel. There is something to say for and against it. “For” it, the freshness with which the mind, untrammelled with the bodily weariness of “diligence” or “vetturino” jogging, receives impressions of points of interest; “against” it, the hustling of venerable monuments and reverenced natural features which should be approached with more ceremony. There is too much hustling nowadays. I don’t know that I enjoyed my last visit to Venice quite as much as usual, feeling apologetic and guilty in participating in the “bumping” of the gondolas by the electric boats, whose back-wash sends them hopping and lurching in such an undignified manner. The sedate, gracious gondola, too well-bred ever to be in a hurry, “knocked out of time” by a fussing little electric launch, which is always in a hurry, with or without reason! What with the hurry, and the whistlings, and puffings, and syren-bellowings, the powers that be are actually succeeding in making Venice noisy. But I have got off the Egyptian track a long way.

After a visit to Sakkara and to the Pyramids and the Sphinx I shall launch out upon Old Nile at once. Our Sakkara day was typical of many I was to experience in this strangest of lands—full of the delights, then new to me, of donkey-riding through the fresh winter air of the desert, but donkey-riding over tombs. Sakkara is the necropolis of Memphis, itself long buried, that capital of the Pyramid Period that looms dark far behind the nearer glories of Thebes and the Temples.

My hilarity induced by the sun, the breeze, the absurd goings-on of the donkeys of our party was constantly damped by the weird reminders we constantly came upon. Those Sakkara pyramids lack the majesty of the Pyramids, and one looks at the amorphous heaps in an oppressed silence. The Tomb of Ti raised one’s spirits by its vivid frescoes showing the every-day life of that Prime Minister’s ménage: it was cheery to see the poulterer in brilliant colours bringing in the goose to the cook, but the final extinguisher fell when we were conducted along an avenue—a sandy causeway—lined on either side with I forget how many sarcophagi of sacred bulls. Each granite sarcophagus was, as far as my memory could say, of exactly the same dimensions and of almost the same shape as that of the great Napoleon at the “Invalides”! And all for bulls.

It was crushing; but well for me was the scamper back to the Cairo train. You cannot afford to be pensive riding a donkey at that pace with an Arab saddle to which you are not yet accustomed.

I am not going to dare to try to say anything new about the Pyramids of Gizeh or the Sphinx; nothing new in any shape can come in contact with these monuments. One feels overcome with hoariness oneself by their mere proximity and silenced by the weight of ages. I am not going to ask you to follow me into any interiors, for I did not go in myself; and indeed, in my progress through this land of tombs, I protested more or less successfully against burrowing into sepulchres, shuffling in thick gloom through pungent and uncanny mummy dust, in bat-scented atmosphere, while above-ground the blessed light of that matchless sky and the uplifting air of the desert were being wasted. Polite compulsion on certain social and festive (!) excursions alone forced me to forego for a while the joy of that “to-day” above-ground for the mould of the dead Aeons below.

I refer to a letter for my first visit to the Pyramids. That first sight of anything one has read of and pictured in one’s child’s mind in the course of education is a most precious occurrence, to be chronicled and set down at the moment.

30th November ‘85.—“A sweet gentle morning; limpid air, lovely fresh clouds in a soft blue sky. We started at 11 in a carriage, with our dragoman, and were soon taken at the usual hand gallop over the big iron bridge with the colossal green lions at each end which spans the wide Nile, into the acacia-shaded road which runs for a long distance in an imposing straight line to almost the very base of the great Pyramid. As we sped towards the illustrious group which we saw rising grey and stern at the very edge of the desert where it meets the bright green of the cultivated land we alternately looked ahead at what was awaiting us and at the ever-interesting groups of men, women, children, and animals which we passed, and at the mud villages with their palms and rude domes and minarets which lay in the well-watered, low-lying land on either side of the road. From the first moment I saw the Pyramids afar off I knew I was not destined to be disappointed, and my apprehensions caused by some travellers’ descriptions vanished at the outset. It is difficult to put my feelings into words as I came nearer and nearer to these wonders of man’s work, so pathetic in their antiquity and in the evidence they give of their builders’ colossal failure to ensure for their poor bodies absolute safety during the long waiting for the Resurrection. The seals are broken, the secret places found out, the contents gone to the winds!

“My beloved father was constantly in my mind to-day, for he it was who with such patience taught us the value and fascinating interest of old Egyptian history, and here were some of the scenes he used to read to us of so often, but which he himself was not allowed to see. “Mrs. C—— and I, on getting out of the carriage, first made the circuit of the Great Pyramid—a space of ‘thirteen statute acres,’ I remember Menzies telling us. I found that the most striking point from which to feel the immensity of the Pyramids is in the centre of the base, not the angles.

“We hear of ‘weeping stone.’ Here is stone that has wept blood and tears! Each succeeding year of the king’s reign forced an additional coating to his tomb, and prolonged the slave-toil under the lash—all to safeguard a little dust that has now vanished. This age of ours is about the time the old Egyptians looked to for the Great Awakening, for which all their poor mummies were embalmed.

“How intolerable these three Pyramids must have looked when new and entirely coated with white marble. Their glitter under the blinding sunlight and the hardness of their repellent shapes make me shudder as I realise the effect. Seen in the rough, as they now are, they do not jar, but only oppress the mind by their ponderous immensity, and the eye takes great pleasure in their tawny colouring.

“We next went down to the Sphinx and rested a long while in its broad shadow. The gaze of the eyes is exceedingly impressive, and though the face is so mutilated one would not have it restored. Strange that one should prefer the broken nose and the hare-lip! It would not be the Sphinx if it had the universal Sphinx face as originally carved. Originally! When? It was there long before the Pyramids, and it now appears that more than the ‘forty centuries’ looked down upon Napoleon’s army from their summits. Sixty centuries, some say now. Time is annihilated as one stands confronted with the Sphinx, and a feeling of annihilation swirls around one’s own microscopic personality.

“This annihilation of Time is one of the sensations of Egypt. Look at Rameses the Great in his glass coffin in the Cairo Museum. There, more than ever, the intervening cycles are as though they had never been as one stands face to face with Sesostris. More appalling than the Sphinx—a chimera in stone—here is the Man. Not his effigy, not his mask taken after death, but the Man! There is his hair, rusted by the Ages, his teeth still in their sockets, the gash across his forehead cleft in battle. His father lies in the next glass case, his grandfather on the other side, and many other Pharaohs similarly enclosed in glass and docketed lie around, all torn out of their hiding-places, stripped of their multitudinous envelopes, and exposed to the stare of the passers-by. Their mortuary jewels are ticketed in other glass cases, and only a few shreds of winding-sheet adhere to their bodies. They were religiously preserved, at infinite pains, for this.

“From the entrance to the Great Pyramid in the north face I had an enchanting view of Cairo on the right, in sun and shadow with a sky of most beautiful cloud-forms, and on the left the lovely pearly and rosy desert stretching away into the golden West. How cheerily, how consolingly the wholesome, refreshing Present receives us back after those wanderings down the corridors of the dead Ages! Let us wash our faces and smile again and feel young. The drive back was exhilarating and full of living interest. We overtook shepherds guiding their flocks along the road and carrying tired lambs on their shoulders. There were buffaloes and oxen and ploughmen going home from work in the tender after-glow, and then as soon as we were over the big iron bridge and in the suburbs again it was dark, and the gas lamps were being lighted, and ‘Tommy Atkins’ was about, and British officers were riding in from polo, and the cafés of this Parisianized quarter were full and noisy, and I felt I had leapt back into To-day by crossing an iron bridge that spanned six thousand years. My thoughts lingered long amongst the most ancient, most pathetic, most solemn monuments of the pre-Christian world.”

CHAPTER II
THE UPPER NILE

AND now for Luxor. Of all the modes of travel there is none, to my mind, so enjoyable as that by water—fresh water, be it understood—and if you can do this in a house-boat with your home comforts about you, what more can you desire? We had the “Post Boat” to Luxor, and the sailing dahabieh after that. Travelling thus on the Nile you see the life of the people on the banks, you look into their villages, yet a few yards of water afford you complete immunity from that nearer contact which travel by road necessitates; and in the East, as you know, this is just as well. Not that I really allow the drawbacks of the East to interfere with my own enjoyment, but the isolation of the boat is best, especially with little children on board.

I had read many books of travel on the Nile and knew what to look for. Is there not a charm in knowing that some city, some temple, some natural feature you have tried to realize in your mind is about to appear in very truth just round that bend of road or river? You are going to see in a few minutes that historic thing itself, not its counterfeit in a book, but it. And so, as we neared Luxor towards evening, I looked out for Karnac on the left, and lo! the first pylon glided by. My first pylon! How many like it I was to see before I had done with Old Nile. They are not beautiful in shape, nor can any Egyptian architecture, as far as form goes, be called beautiful; the shapes are barbaric—I had almost said brutal—stupidly powerful and impressive by mere bulk. The beauty lies in the colouring. What a feast these ruins afford to the eye by their colour, what a revel of blues, greens, and low-toned reds in their unfaded paintings! Taken as bits of colour only, without dwelling too much on the forms, all in such light, the shadows filled with golden reflections—taken thus, or deeply tinged with the lustrous after-glow, or the golden moonlight, they are all-satisfying.

I will not, however, burden you with these ponderous pylons and mammoth monoliths; they can only be enjoyed in situ, illuminated and glorified by the climate of their homes. Indeed, I felt often very oppressed and tired by them, but never did I weary of the landscape, the people, the animals, the river.

One very saddening glimpse of fellah life was afforded Mrs. C—— and myself at Luxor by the English Consul (a negro), who arranged that we should see the registering of the young fellaheen for the conscription. I think the British have changed all this lately, so we were lucky in seeing a bit of the vanishing Past—a remnant of the Oriental Past which no one can regret. We worked our way, led by the Consul, through the Arab crowd in the village till we came to the entrance of the courtyard where the drama was about to open. At the gate was a scuffling mass of indescribably hideous old hags—the mothers and aunts and grannies of the young fellahs inside, wailing and jerking out their lamentations with marionette-like action of their shrivelled arms. As though by one accord they would stop dead for a minute and look at each other, and then all together begin again the skeleton chorus, throwing dust on their heads. The unsavoury group came in with us pell-mell when the gate was opened, and we found ourselves hoisted rather than conducted to a divan prepared for us under a shed, from whence we could see all that passed.

Three Circassian inspectors, looking horrid in European clothes, were at the head of a long rickety table, covered with a white cloth, in front of us. This white cloth, in combination with the surging groups, made a wonderfully good blank space in the composition of what I thought would make a striking picture. The sketch I insert here is in no particular arranged by me, but everything is exactly as I saw it. I noted everything down in my sketch-book on the spot. The sheiks, stately men in silken robes, who had brought each his quota of recruits from his district, sat chatting over their coffee at the farther end of the table, and the doctor at once set to to examine the miserable youths that came up for registration. Fathers pleaded exemption for their sons on one pretext or another, such as leprous heads, blindness, weak chests, and so forth; the mothers, aunts, and grannies aforesaid went on jibbering and clacking their jaws in the background, no one paying the least attention to them. If a fellah was passed by the doctor a gendarme gripped him and pummelled him all the way to the standard, where he was measured. If satisfactory, the woe-begone creature received a sounding box on the ear, just in fun, from the gendarme, and was shoved into the pen where the successful (!) candidates were interned; if he was below the mark, all the same he got his blow, and was pushed and cuffed back to his friends and relatives. One mother had crept forward while her son was having his lanky leg straightened by the doctor, the father pleading the boy’s lameness (Erckmann-Chatrian’s Conscript orientalised!): a gendarme sprang forward and knocked her down, then hauled her off by her arms, which were so very thin and suggestive of a mummy that I could not look any longer; he was so rough I really thought he would pull them out of their sockets. My friend was crying, and if I had not been so concentrated on my pencil notes I should have cried too. “Surely,” she said, “that can’t be his mother, she looks a hundred at least.” “A hundred!” I exclaimed, “she is four thousand years old—a mummy!” I felt very sick as well as sorry. We were politely offered coffee in jewelled cups, which we could not taste, and surreptitiously emptied behind the divan.

The English have worked wonders since those days with the Egyptian army. Taking the young men in the right way our officers have turned them into remarkably smart-looking soldiers, and their terror of the service, I am told, has vanished.

This was altogether a day which showed us the seamy side of Egyptian life, for in the evening we and all the guests of the hotel went to see the dancing at the café, a sort of mud cave full of wood smoke. It was all very ugly and repulsive, and the music was impish and quite in keeping. I was glad to have this experience, but once is enough. Talking of music, I don’t know anything more appealing in its local sentiment than the song of our crew when they were hauling and poling on calm nights later on. Strange, unaccustomed intervals, and the key always in the minor. In the pauses we heard the beetles and crickets on the banks chiming in in a cheerful major.

Our sojourn at Luxor was a time of deep enjoyment, for we made almost daily excursions on both banks of the Nile, excursions beginning in the very early mornings, at sunrise, and ending in gallops home on our donkeys in the after-glow, or trips on board the ferry-boat, from Thebes, in a crowd of splendid Arabs, whose heads, figures, and blue and white robes, or brown striped camel’s hair burnouses, added greatly to the charm of the landscape. It was a joy merely to breathe that desert air. All that was wholesome and not too tiring, nor risky from the sun, was enjoyed by the children with us, but I kept them chiefly in the paradisaical hotel garden as the safest place. One had to be very careful. I cannot say that “black care” did not sometimes ride on my donkey’s crupper, for I knew W. was pressing the enemy harder every day, and that a battle was imminent. At last the great telegram came. Ginniss was fought and won, and all the enemy’s guns and standards taken. He sent me the message from the field. We might now come up. It took a day or two to get the “Fostât” ready—the dahabieh which he had sent down for us. Some wounded officers from the front brought news of the battle, and, strange to relate, the only officer killed at Ginniss was son of one of Mrs. C.’s oldest friends! What strange things happen in life. I had met young Soltau the year before at her house on Dartmoor, and she and I were destined to hear together of his death in battle on the Upper Nile.

We set sail in the first week of ‘86 for Assouan, where W. was to meet us, and I witnessed the daily development of the Nile’s beauties with the deepest pleasure, and a mind no longer over-shadowed.

I wonder how many people who have been to Egypt recognise the fact that all its beauty is reflected? It is either the sun or the moon or the stars that make Egypt glorious. Under thick cloudy skies it would be nothing. But the co-operation of the illuminated objects is admirable, and the two powers combined produce the Egypt we admire. W. and I came to the same conclusion, that much of the glory of the moonlights is owing to the response of the desert, especially the golden desert of Nubia.

But I have also seen, on rare occasions, delicate effects of veiled sunshine on river, palms, and desert too exquisite in refinement to be easily described. I remember one memorable grey day which we spent in turning the loveliest river reach of the whole series below Assouan, the wind having completely dropped—a day which dwells in my memory as a precious passage of silvery colour amidst all the gold. The palm-tree stems towards sundown were illuminated with rosy light against the pallid background of sand-hills facing the West, and of the delicate pearl-grey sky. The greens were cool and vivid, the water like a liquid opal. I wrote a whole letter to Mamma on that one grey day on the Nile. But even that evening the after-glow made itself felt through the clouds, lighting them from behind in an extraordinary manner, so that the filmy screen appeared red-hot. The beautiful cloud-veil could not shut out so fervid a rush of colour.

When a strong wind blows the desert sand into the air, obscuring the sun and thickening the sky, what a change comes over the scene! Egypt is then undoubtedly ugly, and all charm flies away on the wings of the blast.

But the blast speeds the dahabieh on its way, and pleasant it was sitting of an evening in the cosy saloon to see the hanging lamp swinging with the motion of the bounding “Fostât,” and to hear the creaking of the timbers, for the distance from Assouan, where W. was to meet us, was being sensibly diminished. On some other evenings the fair north wind was just enough to quicken the pace without dulling the brilliant light of the moon, and there was to be no tying up under the mud bank those nights. Then again a dead calm might come down upon us, and after poling, tracking, or hauling up to the kedge anchor all day to their monotonous sing-song, the crew would have orders to moor for the night. I would then venture a run along the shore with the children, and have a scamper among the palms and cotton plants, which were waving and rustling mysteriously to imperceptible sighings of the air at the water’s edge. One or two armed men, of course, landed also.

At Esneh I had the honour of entertaining the Pasha of that wonderful place, whose temple I had particularly wished to see. He received us with much ceremony, and we all went on shore escorted by his guard in great state, walking through the bazaars accompanied by the wild and ragged population. But for the soldiers and their whips we could not have moved a yard. We visited the wonderful temple, the first we had seen with the ceiling intact, which the colossal pillars were made to support. I prefer the ruins so open to the sky that the sun may be seen amongst them. Here, owing to the unbroken ceiling, all was gloom. At Edfoo I was to see a whole temple with pylons and all, almost in perfect preservation, and to know the Egyptian temple in its entirety.

How funny our party looked—two English ladies, two little children, and English maid, guarded by bashi-bazouks, slowly progressing through a crowd of indescribable dirt and wildness. We looked into an oil mill where the press was exactly like the wine-presses in Tuscany. You remember the one I sketched at Signa, the picturesque Strettojo of the vintage? We poked our noses into the cavernous recesses where gigantic negroes were dyeing the native cloth a splendid indigo, their black arms blue to the shoulder. Oh, what colour!

On going back to the dahabieh we all, except myself, had our fortunes told in a narrow lane where a row of Soudanese fortune-tellers were squatting with patches of smooth sand before them on which they made the person interested impress his or her hand. Upon the impression they made many signs and marks. Everything was quite satisfactory. The children were to have “pleasant paths in life and strong loins.” The maid was to marry a white man, which was a comfort.

In the evening the Pasha dined on board. He spoke in French, and nothing could surpass the florid eulogies he bestowed on “his brother, that lion,” my husband. I saw him depart on his sleek and fat white ass, which stood quite fourteen hands, and was equipped in Arab trappings of indigo and dead gold. In the morning I received the Pasha’s presents of fruit, vegetables, eggs in hundreds, two live turkeys, and a black lamb. A gorgeous cavass in sky blue and carrying a wand of office was installed on board for the rest of the voyage to Assouan. There had been feasting and much thumping of tom-toms and whinings of curious fiddles on deck during dinner the night before, where the crew were entertaining the Pasha’s body-guard. My dragoman’s bill next day included these items: “Trinks and trymbals for the crew”; “hay for the limp.” The poor black “limp” with his hay was put into the little boat in tow, and I had to deliver him up, as a matter of course, to the crew a few days later. Then came Edfoo, whose temple is one of the most conspicuous in Egypt. I had been on the look-out for its mighty pylons with especial eagerness, and I was glad that we had time to spend two hours on land while some repairs were being done on the “Fostât.” The Esneh cavass was useful as well as extremely ornamental, as he kept off the wild crowd in the village by magical waves of his wand of office, and an occasional thump on a screaming villager.

The guard turned out and saluted our party, and altogether things went very well, and I enjoyed my long-looked-forward-to Edfoo.

Then on board again, with a steady north breeze which, if it had filled our eyes with sand at Edfoo, was making up for the discomfort by carrying us in spanking style towards Assouan and the meeting.

After one of our fair-wind nights, when the “Fostât” was bowling along over the lumpy water, I asked the reis if we had come to Comombos. He made vigorous signs showing we had passed it in the night. “Silsileh?”; again the welcome backward wave of his arm. That, too, was long passed. We were getting very near. I noticed the people on the banks were becoming blacker and there were fewer of them; the mountains had vanished and were replaced by lion-coloured sand-hills, typically African. The black rocks looked like sleeping crocodiles.

A faint whisp of smoke presently rose beyond a bend of the river, far ahead. “What is that?” I asked the dragoman. “English steamer.” Great excitement. The little armed steamer puffs into sight; some one is waving a red handkerchief from the turret! “Furl the “Fostât’s” mainsail!” The crew swarm up the spar. Ding, ding goes the electric bell on the gunboat. The meeting is an accomplished fact—we from Plymouth, he from Wady Halfa. We are soon at Assouan, and while the “Fostât” is being hauled by great gangs of negroes through the cataract, we are guests of the General in that command on board his charming dahabieh moored under Philæ. There the solemn rocks echo the waltzes of the military band and the talk and laughter of our réunions on board the “Pharaon.”

If the Egyptian desert answered back in harmonious tones the light of the sun and moon, what a crescendo of glowing response came from the Nubian sands! Immediately we crossed the frontier my eyes were surprised by the golden tone the desert had assumed, and the polished rocks that studded it had suddenly put on the richest colours granite holds—deep red and purple, and the black of basalt. It was a new scheme of colouring. The sunset and the after-glow were still more astonishing than those of Egypt, the colour of the shadows on the golden sands at sundown more positive in their limpid colours. One felt looking at the stars and planets as though one had been lifted to a world nearer to them than before, so large and clear had they grown even from the extraordinary clearness they had at Luxor. Oh! land of enchantment, is it any wonder the Nile is so passionately loved, especially by the artist, to whom the joy of the eye is supreme? As to worthily painting the Egyptian landscape, I cannot think any one will ever do it—the light is its charm, and this light is unattainable. There is one thing very certain, oil paints are hopelessly “out of it,” and in water-colours alone can one hope to suggest that light. I soon gave up oils in Egypt, not only on account of their heaviness, but the miseries I endured from flies and sand were heart-breaking; your skies are seamed with the last wanderings and struggles of moribund flies, and coated with whiffs of sand suddenly flung on them by a desert gust! I was particularly anxious to get a souvenir of the doorway in the court of the temple on Philæ Island, where Napoleon’s soldiers engraved their high-sounding “Une page d’histoire ne doit pas,” etc. Unfortunately, on the day I chose, we had a high wind, a very exasperating ordeal, and my attempt at oil-sketching this subject was a fiasco. After persevering with one half-blinded eye open at a time and with sand thickly mixed with my paints, I saw the panel I had been desperately holding on the easel hurled to the ground on its buttered side as for a moment I turned to answer a remark of Mrs. C.’s. She said I bore it angelically. As since those days lovely Philæ Island is being submerged and the temple melting away, the poor little panel has become more historically valuable than I thought it ever would do at the time, and I insert its replica in water-colours minus the smudges.

Many pleasant hours we spent at Philæ, which, I suppose, is the culminating point of the Nile’s beauties and marvels. One day, while W. was gone to Assouan for provisions, I went over with Mrs. C. to the opposite bank of the river by boat, an imp of a small boy taking upon himself to escort us. He divested himself of his one garment, which he carried in a bundle on his head, and swam alongside our “felucca.” Our approach had been observed from a wild mud hamlet up on the fantastic rocks, and a bevy of black and brown women came hopping and skipping down to us. Little shrivelled old hags and wild little young women with nose rings and anklets, their hair plaited in hundreds of little tails reeking with castor oil, each little tail ending in a lump of mud.

Mrs. C. asked them to unfasten and display their locks, and in return let down her own six-foot-long auburn tresses and stood on them to “astonish the natives.” They danced and wailed in slow cadence, softly clapping their hands and wagging their heads in admiration as they made the round of the tall, rosy Englishwoman. There she stood, on her hair, that trailed on the sand, in a golden halo of sunshine, the grim hypæthral temple and the huge rocks as background, and surrounded by little skinny, skipping, half-naked, barbarian women and quite-naked little children. They turned to me and made signs that I should also let my hair down. Because I excused myself, the little boy imp, still with his garment on his head, came forward and took upon himself condescendingly to explain to the little women, shouting “Mafeesh, mafeesh!” (“Nothing, nothing!”) and dismissing me with a wave of his arm.

From Philæ we soon glided into the Tropics. I say in a letter: “The moonlight in Nubia also surpasses that of Egypt, and I see in it a light I never saw before I came to this wonderful land. It is difficult to describe this light. It is brilliant yet soft; light in darkness; not like the day; not like the dawn: the sky at full moon is so bright that only the larger stars are seen; and the yellow sand, the ashen bloom on the tops of the sand-hills, the various tones of green in palm-tree, tamarisk, and mimosa keep distinctly their local tints, yet softened and darkened and changed into a mysterious vision of colour too subtle for words of mine. Every night Venus and other great planets and stars shed reflections in the still water like little moons in every part of the Great Stream wherever one turns.”

W. could not spare the time for lotus-eating under sail, so a “stern-wheeler” towed us from Philæ to Wady Halfa. It took very little away from the romance, and the steady progress was very grateful. On that glassy river, as it was now, we would have been an age getting to our goal.

I was greatly struck with Korosko, a place which, besides its natural desolate and most strange appearance, was sad with memories of Gordon. This was his starting-point as he left the Nile to travel across the desert to Khartoum, never to return. From a height one can see the black and grey burnt-up landscape which lonely Gordon traversed. It is a most repellent tract of desert just there, calcined and blasted. A view I had of the Nile, southward, from the mountains of Thebes one day, though bathed in sunshine, has remained most melancholy in my mind, because, looking towards Khartoum, I thought of the hundreds of my countrymen who lay buried in already obliterated graves all along those lonely banks, away, away to the remote horizon and beyond, sacrificed to the achievement of a great disaster. Others like them have arisen since and will arise, eager to offer their lives for success or failure, honours or a nameless grave.

One evening, as the “Fostât,” in tow, was skimming through the calm water with a rippling sound, and we were all sitting on deck, W. described to us so vividly a memorable night before the fight that put a stop to hostilities, that I could see the whole scene as though I had been there. They were out in the desert, the moon was full; the Dervishes were “sniping” at long range, when afar off was heard a Highland “lament.” The “sniping” ceased all along the enemy’s line and dead silence fell upon the night but for the wail of the bagpipes. The Dervishes seemed to be listening. The “lament” increased in sound, and presently the Cameron Highlanders approached, bearing, under the Union Jack, the body of an officer who had died that day of fever, to add yet another grave to the number that lay at intervals along the shores of the great river. You should hear the pipes in the desert, as well as on the mountain-side, to understand them.

“Every phase of the day and night” (letter, 12th January ‘86), “appeals to me on the Nile, not forgetting those few moments that follow the after-glow which are like the last sigh of the dying day. The delicacy of those pure tints is such that one scarcely dares to handle them in writing. Evening after evening I have watched by the desert death-bed of the day, looking eastward so as to have the light upon the hills.

“Those tender, sad, pathetic hills, and beyond them the mournful mountains, possessing nothing,—not a blade of grass, not a lichen, not a herb; they are absolute paupers amongst mountains, and they might be in the moon, these derelicts, so bereft are they of all things.

“And yet the light, the atmosphere, give them a consoling beauty. What a poem might be written to them as they look thus for a minute or two before the dark-blue pall of night sinks down!”

Wady Sabooah, the “Valley of Lions,” was one of the most striking things I had seen on this exquisite section of our river voyage. The abrupt sand-hills held shadows of the most delicate amethyst at noonday which, combined with the gold of the sunlit parts, produced a delicacy of vibrating tones which enchanted the eye but saddened the artist’s mind, recognising as it did the futility of trying to record such things in paint! But I shall weary you with all this daily rapture, and I will bid good-bye in these pages to the desert, well named by the Moslems “The Garden of Allah.” There is no pollution there, and He may walk in His garden unoffended.

In the first really hot days of March I and the children came home—Wady Halfa was becoming no place for us, and W. remained with his Brigade through the weary days of summer, unknown in their exhausted and horrible listlessness to me who will always think of the Nile as an earthly paradise. One halt I must make on our way down, at Abu Simbel, that mysterious rock temple I had longed to see in the first ray of sunrise, for it faces due east. W., who accompanied us as far as Assouan, gave orders that our stern-wheeler (the old “Fostât” had been dismissed) should tie up overnight at the temple, and before daylight I was up and ready. I had packed my water-colours and had only a huge canvas and oil-paints available. With these I climbed the hill and waited for the first ray in the wild wind of dawn.

The event was all I hoped for as regards the effect of those “scarlet shafts” on the four great figures (how many sunrises had they already awakened to?) “A great cameo,” Miss Amelia Edwards calls that façade at sunrise in her fascinating book, and that phrase had made me long for years for this moment. But alas! my canvas acted as a sail before the wind and nearly carried me into the river, the sand powdered the wet paint more viciously than ever, and I returned very blue to breakfast. Still, I had got my “Abu Simbel at Sunrise,” and I insert a water-colour taken in comfort from the hard-earned but scarcely presentable original.

CHAPTER III
ALEXANDRIA

OUR subsequent experiences of Egypt at Alexandria from ‘90 to ‘93 made me acquainted with the Delta and that “Lower Nile” which has a very particular charm of its own, and possesses the precious advantage of being out of the tourist track altogether.

Not the least amongst the attractions of an Egyptian command (to Madame!) is the yearly autumn journey to that country through Italy, with Venice as an embarkation point. Madame knows nothing of the horrors of the summer months endured by the “man on duty” out there, and serenely enjoys “the best,” without the seamy side ever turning up. She thinks that to spend one’s winters on the Nile, and one’s summers in the “Emerald Isle,” is as near an ideal existence as this world allows us. It is good to be a woman!

That farewell scene at Venice on board the P. & O., when friends came to see us off with bouquets and “bon voyage”—how I should like just one more of those gay leave-takings! I see again the dancing gondolas on the sparkling ripples as they wait round the ship; the hat and handkerchief wavings ashore and afloat, and Venice encircling the sprightly little drama with her gracious arms.

Who that has plied between Italy and Egypt does not know the poetry of that first night at sea, when the cloud-like mountains behind the vanished Venice have also faded away, and there is nothing for it now but to turn to the darkling Adriatic, heaving dimly beyond the ship’s bows, and commit oneself to the mercies of the deep. “And the dinner-bell,” some one is sure to add. Never shall it be said of me that I chronicle the meals of my little travels.

The next morning the cessation of vibrations and throbbings wakes you. Behold through the port-hole Ancona’s white church high up overhead, shining in the level sunbeams of the young day.

The morning after that it is Brindisi, where they wait for the “long sea” passengers and the mails, and the Italian chatter and laughter along the quays never stops. Here, in the course of a stroll, you may pat the two pillars that form the winning-post of that Appian Way whose starting-post you know in Rome.

There is very little monotony in a voyage of this kind, for you are never for long out of sight of land. The Albanian coast, the Ionian Islands, Crete, “Morea’s Hills”—what a series of lovely things to beguile the six days’ passage! Yet, all the same, one has a thrill of delight one day when an unusual stir amongst the crew begins, and the hatches over the heavy baggage-hold are opened, and the lifting gear is got into position. “We shall be in at daybreak.” Bless the captain for those words! And the “man on duty” aforesaid will be standing on the landing-stage.

W. arranged a good studio for me at our new post, but I had distractions. British and Foreign naval squadrons occasionally bore down on us with thundering salutes, and had to be attended to; distinguished and even august personages paused at Alexandria on their way “up”; picnics on horse-back, donkey-back, camel-back, by road, rail, and river, to Aboukir, Aboo-sir, and sundry oases all claimed my delighted co-operation, plus my unsociable sketch-book.

Ah, the good good time, the golden Egyptian days!

But I found nothing so interesting as a holiday we managed to squeeze in and spend on board a little dahabieh for two, on a nine days’ cruise to Rosetta and back. I then knew the Western Delta and, superficially, the life of its neglected and forgotten people. I am much afraid that since the Assouan Dam and its doings, their meagre water-supply is anything but increased, and I pray that the English authorities may remember those poor people at last. They are like fish in a pond that is slowly drying up.

On board the little “Rose,” lent us by an Armenian Bey, I tasted once more the placid pleasure of fresh water travel under sail and oar; and I again heard the strange intervals of the songs that kept the oarsmen in time at their work. But I also learnt what Egyptian rain was like, and how hideous the Mahmoudieh becomes under weeping skies. I saw in this land the deepest and ugliest mud in the world—mud of the colour of chocolate. The weather cleared usually towards evening, and nothing more weird have I ever seen than the villages, cemeteries, solitary tombs, goats, buffaloes, and wild human beings that loomed upon the sky-line on the top of the banks against the windy clouds, reddened by the fiery globe that had sunk below the palm-fringed horizon. These canal banks might give many people the horrors, and I certainly thought them in that weather the uncanniest bits of manipulated nature I had ever seen.

At Atfeh, after three days’ canal, we emerged upon the wide and glorious Nile, and the skies smiled upon us once more. But the sadness of the country remained to us as we contemplated the miserable villages which occurred so frequently, with their poor graveyards at their sides, the latter only distinguishable by the smaller size of the dwellings, and the fact that the huts of the living had doors, and the huts of the dead had none—that was all.

Once on the swift Nile current, with the eight sweeps flashing and splashing to the rhythm of the strange singing (the prevailing north wind being against sailing), we made a good run down to Rosetta, on whose mud bank we thumped in a surprising manner, at 10 P.M. by a pale watery moonlight.

Never have I seen anything sadder than the land we passed through that day—dead, neglected, forlorn. Every now and then what seemed a great city loomed mistily ahead of us, with domes and minarets, and what seemed mighty palaces, piled one above the other on stately terraces. These apparitions were on the sites of once magnificent centres of wealth and luxury, and from afar they might still appear to be what once they were. Then, as we neared them, the domes unveiled themselves into heaps of filthy straw; the palaces were mud hovels a few feet high; the great mosques were merely poor half-ruined tombs into which a single person could scarcely crawl. The illusion occurred every time we came in sight of one of these phantasms, and the effect on the mind was most singular. City after city arose thus on one’s sight in the distance, as though seen through the long ages that have rolled by since their prime, and those long ages seemed like a veil that rapidly dissolved to show us, as we approached, the wretched reality of to-day. “The pride of life,” “pomp,” “arrogance,” “luxury,”—those epithets were their own once, while to-day the very antitheses of such terms would best become them. They are literally all dust now, and there survive only the poor blunt-shaped dwellings for living and dead, that lie huddled together in such pathetic companionship.

As the daylight fades we see the people creeping into their shelters like their animals, to wait, like them, in the unlighted darkness, for the coming of the morning. Their up-river fellow-workers live in a land where the hardships of this cold and muddy winter misery are unknown.

I was glad to see the Rosetta mouth of the Nile, thus completing rather an extended, as well as intimate, knowledge of the great river from there to Sarras in the Soudan. Return tickets to Khartoum had not yet taken travellers by rail up the Nile in so many dusty hours.

Still grey was the weather down to where the river merges into the melancholy sea, between Napoleon’s two dismantled forts, and what beauty there might have been was densely veiled. The old French “Fort St. Julien” was interesting as being the place where the “Rosetta Stone,” which gave the key to all the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was discovered. There we moored for the night on our return to Rosetta, in a Napoleonic atmosphere, and next day I sketched the once opulent commercial city, where now nothing seems doing. A bald old pelican caused some movement in the streets by raiding the odoriferous fish-market and scurrying down, chased by small boys, to the water’s edge where I was sitting, in order to float, by copious draughts, the fish that lay in his pouch down his throat, pill-wise. The pelican always got his pill down in time, and the race to the river was repeated more than once with the small boys. On another evening, on our return voyage, we moored under the wild town of Syndioor, whose minaret, the tallest, I should think, in the world, proved to be no phantom, but a lovely and solid reality. In the pearly light of the succeeding mornings the shining cities looked, through their misty veils, more lovely afar off than ever. Finally we dropped back again between the mud banks of the canal, and in due time landed under the oleanders of our starting-place, the crew kissing hands and paying us the prescribed compliments of farewell.

Our major-domo, Ruffo the European, was with us on board. I must tell you of Ruffo; such an honest man in a country of much corruption! He did all my housekeeping, and that zealously; but, desiring sometimes to consult me about dinner, his figurative way of putting things before me was a little trying. “Miladi, would you like cutlets?” patting his ribs; “or a leg?” advancing that limb; “or, for a very nice entrée, brains?” tapping his perspiring forehead. “Oh no, Ruffo, never brains, please!” He would rejoice in strokes of good luck in the market, and fly through the sitting-rooms to me, perhaps bearing, like a gonfalon, a piece of beef, where good beef was so rare; “Look, miladi, you will not often meet such beef walking in the street.” He always smelled the melons on presenting them to me, to invite my attention to their ripeness.

After Cairo, Alexandria struck me very disagreeably at first; but when I got over its Western pseudo-Italian garishness, I was able to console myself with many a precious bit of orientalism, and even the bizarre mixture of flashy European tinsel with the true native metal amused me so much that I ended by enjoying the place and in being delighted to return there for yet another winter, and another. Nor can I ever forget that this appointment afforded us the most memorable journey of our lives—the ride through Palestine!

Not even the drive on the old Shoubra Road at Cairo surpassed the Alexandrian Rotten Row on the Mahmoudieh Canal on a Friday afternoon in its heterogeneous comicality. Every type was on the Mahmoudieh, in carriages, and on horseback—Levantine, Greek, Jew, Italian, Arab; up and down they rode on the bumpy promenade, under the shade of acacias and other flowering trees that skirted the picturesque canal. Across this narrow strip of water you saw the Arab villages of a totally different world; and I really felt a qualm every time I saw a fellah over the way turning his back to the western sun (and to us) to pray, in absolute oblivion of our silly goings-on. On our side was Worldiness running up and down, helter-skelter; on the other, the repose of Kismet.

Here comes a foreign consul—you know him by his armed, picturesque ruffian on the box—in a smart Victoria, driven by a coal-black Nubian in spotless white necktie and gloves; the Arab horse is ambling along with high measured action. Much admired is Monsieur le Consul—the observed of all observers; he looks as though he felt himself “quite, quite.” But “Awah, awah!” Here come at a smart leaping run two shouting syces turbaned in the Alexandrian fashion; and behind them a barouche and pair driven by an English coachman of irreproachable deportment. What thrilling rivalry is here!

Exquisite horses with showy saddle-cloths there are, with le sport on their backs in the person of “young Egypt” in the inevitable tarboosh. That tarboosh! It is the “bowler” hat of the East, and I don’t know which I hate most—it or the “bowler.”

The ladies are overwhelming; and I rest my eyes occasionally by watching the demure feminine figures of the “East end” who are filling their amphoræ under the oleanders over the way, or washing their clothes and their babies in the drinking water supply of the native town.

Towards sunset there is a sauve qui peut of equipages citywards, and I never heard such a din as is set up as soon as the soft roads are passed and the paved streets are reached. Over it all you may hear:—

The tow-row-row and the tow-row-row
Of the British Grenadiers.

The Suffolks or the Surreys are marching from Mandara Camp to the sound of that drum which we like to remind ourselves “beats round the world.”

III
THE CAPE

CHAPTER I
TO THE CAPE

I DON’T know whether in the Atlantic that lies between England and America you have had calm moonlight nights such as, taking the ocean longitudinally, one may have an impressive experience of, if timing the voyage rightly. I don’t suppose a more favourable time for “detachment” could be easily obtained than those night hours on board a great ship out at sea, when one more easily realizes than in the daytime how the huge “Liner” is but a pathetic little speck on the landless and fathomless waters. The heart of this atom beats courageously enough night and day, without a rest, as it carries its charge onwards to deliver it at the goal that lies in the “Under World,” but never does one more sensitively feel the power of those words, “In the hollow of His hand,” than when realising the true proportion of the “vessel” that carries us and our fortunes.

We spent—the children, Mrs. B. (wife of W.’s Military Secretary), and I—a few hours by night at Madeira, three days out from England, the only land we touched throughout the six thousand miles.

My diary says, 21st February ‘99: “We spent a memorable night on an enchanted Island. Arriving at Funchal overnight instead of in the morning of the next day, as we were timed to do, we took the place by surprise. First we saw a blazing light on an advanced rock, which stood out very black, well ahead of the dusky mass of the Island, which rose high behind it, dimly crowned with spectral snow. The moon, not yet full, was clearing her way through thin cloud veils, and the town at first could be guessed at only by clusters of lights along the shore, where the waves were breaking with a strange clamour on the pebbles.

“Presently balls of fire were sent up on the slopes above the town to tell Funchal we were coming, and, as we slowly rounded into the smooth water of the bay, we could see a little armada of boats pushing out in a flurried line towards us, and we presently heard the Portuguese chatter of their occupants who were soon swarming up the side to try and get all the money out of us that they could in exchange for fruit, embroidery, basket-work, etc. Then a streaming triton appeared at the bulwarks, outside, his face and brawny muscles gleaming in our electric light against the deep-blue background of moonlit sea. The triton asked for sixpences to be thrown into the water, and he dived for them and came up, grinning and streaming, into the light again for more. All the world over, where the seas are clear, this game goes on to beguile the traveller. I must say I think those sixpences are fairly earned when I see to what depths these creatures dive for them in semi-darkness. To what metaphorical depths less honest men descend for petty pelf! but I haven’t time to work this out.

“Soon Mr. Payne came on board, the wine-merchant prince, whom W. had asked to show us the Island and give us our deck chairs. To this most kind friend we are indebted for a memorable experience. He proposed, though it was night, to take us on shore, and I, the three children, and Mrs. B. followed him down the ship’s side to one of the many boats that were lurching and bumping at the foot of the ladder. The first boat tilted over on its side and nearly spilt her two rowers, who rolled out maledictions as the water filled her and lost them their chance of us. We jumped into another and were rowed to the little jetty. On arriving in the town we found little hooded sledges, drawn by small oxen, waiting. We boarded two of these Madeira cabs and drove up to the Casino, our cabmen running by the side and whooping to the oxen. We entered an enchanted garden waving with palms, pines, and blue gum-trees, and other shadowy, dark-foliaged trees, while glossy and feathery shrubs of every type of tropical loveliness bore blossoms which shimmered white, red, and purple in the moonlight. There was a heavy scent of magnolia flowers. Was it all a dream to wake from in Sloane Street? I was in that murky region only three days ago. Was it all a dream? It might be, for things were getting mixed and incongruous. Now cigar smoke kills the magnolia, and some electric lamplets among the trees are jarring with the moon. We suddenly step into a pavilion where a band is playing, and I see smart men and women, very fashionably attired in evening dress, some of them raking in money at the roulette table. We do not stay long there, for we did not land to see such banalities, and, regaining the garden solitudes, make for our bullock sledges, which are to take us up 2000 feet higher through vine-trellised lanes all paved by those polished pebbles set edgewise for the sledges to run smoothly on. Away we go, our cabmen now and then placing a tallow candle enclosed in a bag under the sledge runners to lubricate them, or there would be disagreeable friction. As soon as one runner has passed over the emaciated candle the man on that side throws the candle across to the man on the other, who, stooping, and always at a trot, performs the same juggernautic process on his side. The men are handsome and healthy fellows, wearing their coats hanging loose on their shoulders over snowy shirts. They never speak to Mr. Payne with covered heads.

“There is a funicular railway up this mountain, but it does not work at night, and we thus have a taste of the vanishing Past. Far more effective, this railway, for it climbs the hill boldly and with uncovered sides, whilst our old road is hemmed in by high vineyard walls, and the straining of the little goaded oxen is amongst those belongings of the Past which I will gladly see vanish with it.

“On our way up the incline, which would be impossible to horses and to wheels, our kind cicerone invited us to see his garden and the view of the bay and the great ocean which was swelling away in the light towards Morocco. It was a lovely garden, and we crept about it round the little cosy house, and looked up at the closed shutters, within which la famille Payne lay slumbering. We even went on tip-toe through the sitting-rooms, which the owner, looking as though he was burgling his own house, lit with a little lantern. In one there was a parrot asleep, in another an engraving of the ‘Roll Call,’ and again I began to think I might be dreaming and would wake, with tears, in Sloane Street. But the ‘dream’ was solid and we continued our upward progress with four additional oxen to each sledge and double whooping, and swearing, and prodding, for the gradient now was terrific. At the end of the sledge track we halted, and, getting out, we climbed to the hill top on foot and from there beheld a lovely sight—deep valleys and vine-clad hills and the great ocean beyond, and our Castle Liner blazing with electric light more than 2000 feet below in the profound calm of Funchal Bay. The stars were very lustrous and the ‘Scorpion’s Heart’ aflame with red and green. We then took a mysterious walk in brilliant moonlight and intense black shadow to the edge of a great ravine or coral, from the bottom of which rose the harsh sound of a torrent, invisible in the shadow. Sugarcanes waved in the night breeze and banana plants rustled and whispered, but no one was awake in all the land but our little party.

“Dreamlike again, on our way back to where we had got out of the sledges, we had tea in another enchanted garden at 2 A.M. Our cabmen had hammered at that garden gate a long time, looking like stage peasants knocking at an operatic moonlit portal, before the waiter could be awakened, and by the time we returned from our walk the sleepy creature in tail coat, but minus his tie, was ready for us. When we passed that mysterious threshold we found ourselves in a garden full of the scent of box hedges and tinkling with fountains. We walked in the chequered shadow cast by palms and cypresses, and, soothed by the sound of running water, we felt we would like to stay there till the dawn. What a night to impress the children’s minds with! Our tea was hilarious, in an arbour facing the ocean, but our hilarity was to reach its climax when we got into two toboggans, three people in each, and slithered down the 2000 foot declivity which our oxen had so painfully and slowly drawn us up. The oxen had vanished with the sledges and the drivers, and a new set of men piloted us down the tremendous incline.

“Nothing makes me laugh more than a toboggan in full flight with its helpless load. I had the pace moderated, in spite of protests, for I really did not care to have a variation of the too recent Bay of Biscay; but the toboggans got out of hand sometimes or had to be given their heads round the corners. It was vertigo then.

“Ah, good night, or rather good morning, peerless Madeira!”

Then followed days of blue weather and ever-increasing heat. A lonely voyage—not a sail to be seen. In that long-drawn-out monotony we made the most of trivialities.

I read in my diary one night in the Tropics:—

“There is to be a fancy-dress ball to-night, in connection with crossing the Line the other day, I suppose; the second class passengers are to come over and dance with the first class on the gaily decorated promenade deck. I am pleased at the appearance of the three children. C. has made up from some Eastern muslins a very coquettish Turkish costume with a little cap, which becomes her to my entire satisfaction. E. looks the typical ‘duck’ in a poke bonnet all over little pink roses, and I have buckled up little M. in a colonial cavalry ‘rig,’ slouched hat and all, Captain S. lending his sabre, which is somewhat longer than the temporary owner.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Here I must interpolate the statement of certain facts which will enable you more fully to sympathise with me in the catastrophe that closes this mid-ocean episode.

You must know that white servants are impossible to find at the Cape, and one must bring all one’s staff out with one, “for better, for worse,” it may be for three, four, five years. If any turn out badly, it is true you may send them home, but—who is to replace them? I could not persuade my cook at Dover Castle to undertake this expatriation, her courage failing her at the last moment, and I had to find an untried substitute. She was a Dane with the blood of generations of bellicose Vikings coursing through her veins, and I had watched her daily on the other deck from afar with apprehensions.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“The ball is over and I feel decidedly limp. I thought I was going to have a pleasant evening. I was sitting with Lady —— and all the others who were not masquerading, enjoying the sight of the figures in all kinds of extempore costumes appearing on the deck from below and mustering prior to setting to, the band playing a spirited waltz, when there slowly emerged from the saloon stairway, as though rising from the waves she rules—Britannia! First a high brass helmet with scarlet crest, then a trident held in one hand, a shield in the other, and the folds of the Union Jack draping her commanding form. She stepped on deck. ‘I say,’ said a voice, ‘this is the success of the evening; who is it?’ ‘Who is it?’ you heard on every side. ‘Who is it?’ asked Lady —— turning to me. ‘My cook,’ I faintly answered. The last speaker knew her South Africa, and all the possibilities of the future might have spoken in my face to judge by the choking laughter that caused her precipitate withdrawal. Each time she ventured back within sight of my smileless face the fit seized her again. Later on I saw Britannia dancing in a small set of Lancers hand in hand with the Marchioness. Shall I ever get her harnessed now?”

I went back to hang over the bulwarks and lose myself among the stars.

And so we made our way athwart the world. Each evening every one went to scan the chart where the little “atom’s” progress was marked with, to us, an all too short pen-stroke, showing the distance covered in the last twenty-four hours. And in time the sad South Atlantic broke up the exquisite blue weather of the Tropics.

The diary goes on: “To-night we saw the Pole Star set for the last time. A profound melancholy—a sense of losing a life-companion—falls on the mind. The child who has just seen its old nurse turn a bend in the road and disappear looks with rueful eyes on the bright newcomer. The Southern Cross and all the new stars will never fill the void left by the constellations which I have watched above the beloved scenes of the Northern World. My thoughts follow the Pole Star beyond the dark rim of the horizon. Dear old friend! I shall not feel content, no matter how beautiful I shall find the Southern heavens, till the joyful night when the captain of the Homeward Bound tells us we shall see thee rise. When will that be—in two—in three—years?”

I spoke just now of the “sad” South Atlantic. To me it will always be the saddest part of the world. The sky above it loses the transparent and radiant quality of blue (“less blue than radiant,” Mrs. Browning happily says of the Florentine sky) and takes more of a cobalt quality, and the tone of the sea follows suit. The effect of the diminishing warmth also chills one morally and physically, and one knows that the best is passed. The phrase, “a waste of waters,” comes constantly to the mind.

The following extract from the diary will show how this mournful sentiment of the South Atlantic was one day accentuated—stamped, as it were, with the seal of sorrow, on our return voyage, four days from Cape Town. “We had a burial at sea, the forlornest thing I have ever witnessed. A poor consumptive governess, travelling alone, died last night, who must have been far too ill to be put on board ship. She was buried at eleven this morning.

“We were kneeling near the body, which lay on a bier shaped like a tray, covered with the Union Jack, at the open gangway overhanging the dreary tossing waters. Not a glimpse of blue sky above, the dense clouds shut it out. As she belonged to our Church, W., in uniform, read the prayers and Captain C. the responses. When the prayers were ended the bier was tilted by the six sailors who had been grasping it all through the service. The poor little body, sewn up in sacking, darted out, with a rattle of the leaden weights, from under the covering flag and fell with a loud splash into the black ocean; the flowers that had been placed on it scattered on the foam, and, as the ship scarcely stopped, these were soon left behind to sink and disappear. He who read the prayers said to me when all was over, ‘Christ walks the waters as well as the land.’”

Two days after I read: “A concert this evening, with some comic songs. I noticed the piano was draped with the same Union Jack that covered the poor girl two days ago.”

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One can hardly realize what a sailing voyage of this magnitude must have been in the old days. Our modern impatience can hardly endure the thought. The announcement one evening that at dawn we should sight Table Mountain was extremely pleasant. The arrival had the never-fading charm. “I see papa!” sang out little M. “How are the children?” hailed papa from the quay. “All well!” And we land on utterly new ground to begin a new experience. A short train journey, turning the flank of Table Mountain, brings us to our new home at Rosebank, where I find a pair of shapely Cape ponies harnessed to the Victoria awaiting us at the station.

CHAPTER II
AT ROSEBANK, CAPE COLONY

“STRANGE land; strange birds with startling cries; strange flowers; strange scents! I received a bouquet of welcome on my arrival composed of grass-green flowers with brilliant rose-coloured leaves. Where am I? Where are the points of the compass?

“I was watching the sun travelling to his setting this evening, and, forgetting I was perforce facing North to watch him, he seemed to be sloping down towards the East! And lo! when he was gone, the crescent moon on the wrong side of the sunset and turned the wrong way. And a cold south wind bringing melancholy messages from the Antarctic. ‘There has been a storm in the south,’ some one said, and the words struck drearily on my mind’s ear.

“My Bible, so full of imagery taken from the aspects of Nature, is turned inside out.

Arise (depart), north wind; and come, O south wind; blow through my garden, and let the aromatical spices thereof flow (Canticles iv. 16).

“My Shakespeare is upside down.

At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth.—
Love’s Labour’s Lost.

“Here roses load the Christmas air with sweetness, and May ushers in the snow upon the mountains.

When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.—Sonnet.

“Here April is in the ‘sear and yellow.’

“Yesterday a furnace-blast swooped down upon us from the great deserts to the north, and I feel I shall never be myself while I continue to see my shadow at noonday projected southward. But enough of grumbling for the present.

“Nowhere have I seen such starlight as streams upon the earth from the Milky Way, which belts the whole heavens here with silver. I don’t know why I have never seen the Milky Way so distinct and splendid in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the glory of the South African nights, and I have the pleasure, too, of seeing the entire sweep of the ‘Scorpion’s’ tail, superb scroll of blazing stars. I knew the Southern Cross would be disappointing, and so was not disappointed.

“It gyrates over the Pole in a way to greatly astonish the uninitiated. The other evening, dressing for an evening function, I saw it before my window upright, and on coming home in the small hours, behold it on its head!

“I cannot hope ever to convey to the mind of those who have not experienced Cape Colony the extraordinarily powerful local feeling of these days and nights. Melancholy they are—at least to me—but most, most beautiful and pungently poetical. The aromatic quality of the odours that permeate the air suggests that word. Yet all is too strange to win the heart of a newcomer, however much his eyes and mind may be captivated.

“If an artist wanted to accomplish that apparently impossible feat of painting Fairyland direct from Nature, without one touch supplied out of his own fancy, he would only have to come here. There are effects of light and colour on these landscapes that I never saw elsewhere. The ordinary laws seem set aside. For instance, you expect a palm-tree to tell dark against the sunset. Oh, dear me no, not necessarily here. I saw one a tender green, and the sand about it was in a haze of softest rose-colour, through which shone the vivid orange light of the sunset behind it. Incredible altogether are the colours at sunset, but all so fleeting. And there is no after-glow here as in Egypt and Italy; the instant the glory of the setting sun is gone all is over and all is grey.

“Even the melancholy-quaint sound of the frogs through the night suggests fairy tales. It is appealing in its own way. I thought the Italian maremma frog noisy, but no one can imagine what an orgy of shrill croaking fills the nights here. They are everywhere, these irrepressibles, though invisible; near your head, far away, under your feet, at your side, in the tree-tops, in the streams, for ever springing their rattles with renewed zest. I shall never hear nocturnal frogs again without being transported to these regions of strange and melancholy nights.

“Table Mountain rises square and precipitous above our garden, far above the simmer of the frogs, and looks like an altar in the pure white light that falls upon it from the Milky Way. How still, how holy in its repose of the long ages it looks, and the thought comes to one’s mind, ‘Would that all the evil brought to South Africa by the finding of the gold could be gathered together and burnt on that altar as a peace offering!’

“On this Rosebank side there is nothing that jars with the majestic feeling of Table Mountain, but to see what we English have done at its base on the other side, at Cape Town, is to see what man can do in his little way to outrage Nature’s dignity. The Dutch never jarred; their old farm-houses with white walls, thatched roofs, green shutters, and rounded Flemish gables look most harmonious in this landscape. Wherever we have colonized there you will see the corrugated iron dwelling, the barbed-wire fence, the loathsome advertisement. We talk so much of the love of the beautiful, and yet no people do so much to spoil beauty as we do wherever we settle down, all the world over. I respect the Dutch saying; ‘The eye must have something’—beauty is a necessity to moral health. A clear sky and a far horizon have more value to the national mind than we care to recognize, and though the smoking factory that falsifies England’s skies and blurs her horizons may fill our pockets with gold, it makes us poorer by dulling our natures. I am sure that a clear physical horizon induces a clear mental one.

“As you gaze, enraptured, at the rosy flush of evening on the mountains across “False Bay” from some vantage point on the road to Simon’s Town, your eye is caught by staring letters in blatant colours in the foreground. “Keller’s boots are the best”; “Guinea Gold Cigarettes”; “Go to the Little Dust Pan, Cape Town, for your Kitchen things.” I won’t go to the Little Dust Pan. Of all the horrors, a dust pan at Cape Town, where your eyes are probably full enough of dust already from the arid streets, and your face stinging with the pebbles blown into it by a bitter “sou’easter”? I once said in Egypt I knew nothing more trying than paying calls in a “hamseem,” but a Cape Town “sou’easter” disarraying you, under similar circumstances, is a great deal more exasperating.

“I am told the Old Cape Town, when Johannesburg was as yet dormant, was a simple and comely place—its white houses, so well adapted to this intensely sunny climate, were deep set in wooded gardens, a few of which have so far escaped the claws of the jerry builder. (O United States, what things you send us—“jerry,” “shoddy” ——!) But now the glaring streets, much too wide, and left unfinished, are lined with American “Stores” with cast-iron porticoes, above which rise buildings of most pretentious yet nondescript architecture, and the ragged outskirts present stretches of corrugated iron shanties which positively rattle back the clatter of a passing train or tram-car. And all around lie the dust bins of the population, the battered tin can, the derelict boot. No authorities seem yet to have been established to prevent the populace, white, brown, and black, from throwing out all their old refuse where they like. Some day things may be taken in hand, but at present this half-baked civilization produces very dreadful results. There is promise of what, some day, may be done in the pleasing red Parliament House and the beautiful public gardens of the upper town. There is such a rush for gold, you see! No one cares for poor Cape Town as a town. The adventurer is essentially a bird of passage. Man and Nature contrast more unfavourably to the former here than elsewhere, and the lines,

Where every prospect pleases
And only man is vile,

ring in my ears all day.

“Altogether our Eden here is sadly damaged, and I am sorry it should be my compatriots who are chiefly answerable for the ugly patches on so surpassingly beautiful a scene. Our sophisticated life, too, is out of place in this unfinished country, and we ought to live more simply, as the Dutch do, and not feel it necessary to carry on the same ménage as in London. Liveried servants in tall hats and cockades irritate me under such a sun, and the butler in his white choker makes me gasp. An extravagant London-trained cook is more than ever trying where all provisions are so absurdly dear. The native servant in his own suitable dress, as in India and Egypt, does not exist down here.

“One of the chief reasons, I find, as I settle down in my new surroundings, for the feeling of incompleteness which I experience, is the fact of this country’s having no history. We get forlorn glimpses of the Past, when the old Dutch settlers used to hear the roar of the lions outside Cape Town Fort of nights; and, further back, we get such peeps as the quaint narratives of the early explorers allow us, but beyond those there is the great dark void.

“This is all from my own point of view, and I know there is one, an Africander born,[1] who, with strong and vivid pen, writes with sympathy of the charms of Italy, but only expands into heartfelt home-fervour when returning to the red soil and atmospheric glamour of her native veldt. This personal way of looking at things makes the value of all art, literary and pictorial, to my mind. Set two artists of equal merit to paint the same scene together; the two pictures will be quite unlike each other. I am of those who believe that picture will live longest which contains the most of the author’s own thought, provided the author’s thought is worthy, and the technical qualities are good, well understood.”