CHAPTER VI. THE NILE-ITS BATTLE. The Nile! the Nile! I hear its gathering roar, Curbing the billowy steeds that vex them at his feet. The spirit of our fathers Shall start from every wave; LORD LINDSAY For the deck it was their field of fame, CAMPBELL. "EGYPT is the gift of the Nile," said one* who was bewildered by its antiquity before our History was born (at least he is called the father of it). A bountiful gift it was, that the "strange, mysterious, solitary stream" bore down in its bosom from the luxuriant tropics to the desert. For many an hour have I stood upon the city-crowning citadel of Cairo, and gazed unweariedly on the scene of matchless beauty and wonder that lay stretched beneath my view: cities and ruins of cities, palmforests and green savannahs, gardens, and palaces, and groves of olive. On one side, the boundless desert, with its pyramids ; on the other, the land of Goshen, with its luxuriant plains, stretching far away to the horizon. Yet this is an exotic land! That river, winding like a serpent through its paradise, has brought it from far regions, unknown to man. That strange and richly-varied panorama' has had a long voyage of it! Those quiet plains have tumbled • Herodotus. down the cataracts; those demure gardens have flirted with the Isle of Flowers,* five hundred miles away; those very pyramids have floated down the waves of Nile. To speak chemically, that river is a solution of Ethiopia's richest regions, and that vast country is merely a precipitate. At Pæstum one sees the remnant of a city elaborated from mountain streams; the Temple of Neptune came down from the Calabrian Hills, by water and the Forum, like Demosthenes, prepared itself for its tumult-scorning destiny among the dash of torrents, and the crash of rocks; but here we have a whole kingdom, risen, like Aphrodite, from the wave. The sources of this wonderful river are still veiled in mystery-it is the very heroine of geographical romance, often and warmly wooed, but never won. War has tried to ravish her by force, and Commerce to bribe her by its gold, but the Naïad of the Nile is as virgin as ever. The remotest inhabitants seem to know as little of its origin, yet more remote: I have conversed with slave-dealers familiar with Abyssinia as far as the Galla country, and still their information was bounded by that vague word-south: still from the south gushed the great river. This much is certain, that from the junction of the Taccaze or Astaboras, the Nile runs a course of upwards of twelve hundred miles to the sea, without one tributary stream—“ exemple," as Humboldt says, "unique dans l'histoire hydrographique du globe." During this career, it is exposed to the evaporation of a burning sun, drawn off into a thousand canals, absorbed by porous and thirsty banks, drunk by every living thing, from the crocodile to the pasha, from the papyrus to the palm-tree; and yet, strange to say, it seems to pour into the sea a wider stream than it displays between the cataracts a thousand miles away. The Nile is all in all to the Egyptian: if it withheld its waters for a week, his country would become a desert; it waters and manures his fields, it supplies his harvests, and then Elephantina. For an account of the formation of the travertine of which Pæstum was built, see Sir Humphrey Davy's “Last Days of a Philosopher." carries off their produce to the sea for exportation: he drinks of it, he fishes in it, he travels on it; it is his slave, and used to be his god. Egyptian mythology recognized in it the Creative Principle, and poetically engaged it in an eternal war with the desert, under the name of Typhon, or the Destructive Principle. Divine honors were paid to this aqueous deity; and it is whispered among mythologists that the heart's-blood of a virgin was yearly added to its streams;-not unlikely, in a country where they worshipped crocodiles, and were anxious to consult their tastes. The Arab looks upon all men as aliens who were not fortunate enough to be born beside the Nile; and the traveller is soon talked into a belief that it affords the most delicious water in the world. Shiploads of it are annually sent to Constantinople for the Sultan's hareem, where it is in great request, not only on epicurean, but anti-Malthusian grounds. The natives dignify their beloved river with the title of "El Bahr," the sea, and pass one-third of their lives in watching the flow, and the remainder in watching the ebb, of its mighty tide. The inundation begins in May, attains its full height in August, and thenceforth diminishes, until freshly swollen in the following year. The stream, economized within its channel as far as the first cataract, then spreads abroad its beneficent deluge over the vast valley. Then it is that Egypt presents the most striking of its Protean aspects, becoming an archipelago, studded with green islands, and bounded only by the chain of the Libyan Hills and the purple range of the Mokattam mountains. Every island is crowned with a village, or an antique temple, and shadowy with palm-trees, or acacia groves. Every city becomes a Venice, and the bazaars display their richest and gayest cloths and tapestries to the illuminations that are reflected from the streaming streets. The earth is sheltered from the burning sun under the cool bright veil of waters; the labor of the husbandman is suspended, and it is the season of universal festivity. Boatmen alone are busy, but it would seem to be pleasant business; for the sound of music is never silent beneath those large, white sails, that now glitter in the moonlight, and now gleam ruddily, reflecting the fragrant watchfires on the deck. In one place you come upon a floating fair, held in boats, flushed with painted lanterns, and fluttering with gay flags. In another, a bridal procession is gliding by with mirth and music, as her friends convey some maiden, veiled and crowned with flowers, to her bridegroom. On one island you find a shawled and turbaned group of bearded men, smoking their chibouques and sipping coffee. On another, a merry band of Arab girls is dancing to the music of their own wild song: and then, perhaps, with the lotus flower "wreathed in the midnight of their hair," or the light garment, that scarce concealed their graceful forms, folded as a turban, they swim from grove to grove, the quiet lake scarcely rippling round their dark bosoms. This picture is of rare occurrence, however the inundation seldom rising to a height greater than what is necessary for purposes of irrigation, and presenting, alas! rather the appearance of a swamp than of an archipelago. As the waters retire, vegetation seems to exude from every pore. Previous to its bath, the country, like Pelias, looked shrivelled, and faded, and worn out: a few days after-and old Egypt looks as good as new, wrapped in a richly green mantle embroidered with flowers. As the Nile has everything his own way throughout his wide domains, he is capricious in proportion, and gives spring in October, and autumn in February. Another curious freak of his is to make his bed in the highest part of the great valley through which he runs this bed is a sort of savings-bank, by means of which the deposits of four thousand years have enabled him to rise in the world, and to run along a causeway of his own.* : This sloping away of the surface of the valley from the river's edge materially facilitates the irrigation of the country, in which 50,000 oxen, and at least double that number of men, are perpetually employed. As I shall have frequent occasions to return to the Nile, in speaking of the commerce, the agriculture, and the mode of travelling in Egypt, I shall only add here the following statistics from the report of M. Linant, the pasha's chief engineer. At low water it pours into the sea, by the Rosetta mouth, 79,532,551,728-by the Damietta, 71,033,840,640 cubic metres, in every twenty-four hours, making a total of 150,566,392,368. At high water, by the Rosetta branch, 478,317,838,960-by the Damietta, 227,196,828,480— total 705,514,667,440. The elevation of its waters below the first cataract, Formerly, when vexed by the armaments of a Sesostris or the priestly pageants of a Pharaoh, the Nile required seven mouths to vent its murmurs to the sea. In modern times, it finds two sufficient; Damietta, of crusading memory, presides over one, and Rozetta, in Arabic "el Rashid," the birth-place of our old friend Haroban, takes advantage of the other. The former is waited upon by Lake Menzaleh, where alone the real ibis and the papyrus are now found-the latter looks eastward on Lake Bourlos, and westward over Aboukir Bay, of glorious memory. 'Tis an old story now, that battle of the Nile, but a brave story can never die of age; and as the traveller paces by these silent and deserted shores, that have twice seen England's flag "triumphant over wave and war," he lives again in the stirring days when the scenery before him was the arena whereon France and England contended for the empire of the East. Let us rest from blazing sun and weary travel in the cool shadow of this palm-tree. Our camels are kneeling round us, and our Arabs light their little fires in silence. They remember well the scenes we are recalling, though many a Briton has almost forgotten them, and the names of Nelson and of Abercrombie are already sounding faint through the long vista of departed times. We overlook the scene of both their battles, and envy not Thermopyla to the Spartan, or Salamis to the Athenian. i. e. 250 leagues from its embouchure, is 543 French feet above the level of the Mediterranean: it runs at the rate of about three miles an hour during its flood, and two during its low water. The deposit of the river, of which the country is composed, yields by analysis three-fifths of alumina, one-fifth of carbonate of lime, one-twentieth of oxide of iron (which communicates the reddish color to its waters), some carborate of magnesia, and pure silex. The mean rate of accumulated soil seems to be about four inches in a century in Lower Egypt; and about forty feet depth of soil has thus been flung over the desert since the deluge. In the time of Maris, the lands were sufficiently watered, if the Nile rose to the height of eight cubits; in the time of Herodotus, it required fifteen cubits; and now the river must rise to the height of twenty-two before the whole country is overflowed. Still, as the deposits increase the Delta, the river is proportionately dammed up, and thus the great watering-machine is kept in order by Nature, with a little assistance from Mehemet Ali. |