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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.”
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.
