Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) (649 page)

The little
Korosko
puffed and spluttered her way up the river, kicking up the white water behind her, and making more noise and fuss over her five knots an hour than an Atlantic liner on a record voyage. On deck, under the thick awning, sat her little family of passengers, and every few hours she eased down and sidled up to the bank to allow them to visit one more of that innumerable succession of temples. The remains, however, grow more modern as one ascends from Cairo, and travellers who have sated themselves at Gizeh and Sakara with the contemplation of the very oldest buildings which the hands of man have constructed, become impatient of temples which are hardly older than the Christian era. Ruins which would be gazed upon with wonder and veneration in any other country are hardly noticed in Egypt. The tourists viewed with languid interest the half-Greek art of the Nubian bas-reliefs; they climbed the hill of
Korosko
to see the sun rise over the savage Eastern desert; they were moved to wonder by the great shrine of Abou-Simbel, where some old race has hollowed out a mountain as if it were a cheese; and, finally, upon the evening of the fourth day of their travels they arrived at Wady Haifa, the frontier garrison town, some few hours after they were due, on account of a small mishap in the engine-room. The next morning was to be devoted to an expedition to the famous rock of Abousir, from which a great view may be obtained of the second cataract. At eight-thirty, as the passengers sat on deck after dinner, Mansoor, the dragoman, half Copt half Syrian, came forward, according to the nightly custom, to announce the programme for the morrow.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, plunging boldly into the rapid but broken stream of his English, “to-morrow you will remember not to forget to rise when the gong strikes you for to compress the journey before twelve o’clock. Having arrived at the place where the donkeys expect us, we shall ride five miles over the desert, passing a very fine temple of Ammon-ra which dates itself from the eighteenth dynasty upon the way, and so reach the celebrated pulpit rock of Abou-sir. The pulpit rock is supposed to have been called so because it is a rock like a pulpit. When you have reached it you will know that you are on the very edge of civilisation, and that very little more will take you into the country of the Dervishes, which will be obvious to you at the top. Having passed the summit, you will perceive the full extremity of the second cataract, embracing wild natural beauties of the most dreadful variety. Here all very famous people carve their names, — and so you will carve your names also.”

Mansoor waited expectantly for a titter, and bowed to it when it arrived. “You will then return to Wady Haifa, and there remain two hours to suspect (sp.) the Camel Corps, including the grooming of the beasts, and the bazaar before returning, so I wish you a very happy good-night.” There was a gleam of his white teeth in the lamplight, and then his long, dark petticoats, his short English cover-coat, and his red tarboosh vanished successively down the ladder. The low buzz of conversation which had been suspended by his coming broke out anew.

“I’m relying on you, Mr. Stephens, to tell me all about Abousir,” said Miss Sadie Adams. “I do like to know what I am looking at right there at the time, and not six hours afterwards in my state-room. I haven’t got Abou-Simbel and the wall pictures straight in my mind yet, though I saw them yesterday.”

“I never hope to keep up with it,” said her aunt. “When I am safe back in Commonwealth Avenue, and there’s no dragoman to hustle me around, I’ll have time to read about it all, and then I expect I shall begin to enthuse and want to come right back again. But it’s just too good of you, Mr. Stephens, to try and keep us informed.”

“I thought that you might wish precise information, and so I prepared a small digest of the matter,” said Stephens, handing a slip of paper to Miss Sadie. She looked at it in the light of the deck lamp, and broke into her low, hearty laugh.

“
Re
Abousir,” she read; “now, what
do
you mean by ‘
re
,’ Mr. Stephens? You put ‘
re
Rameses the Second’ on the last paper you gave me.”

“It is a habit I have acquired, Miss Sadie,” said Stephens; “it is the custom in the legal profession when they make a memo.”

“Make what, Mr. Stephens?”

“A memo a memorandum, you know. We put
re
so-and-so to show what it is about.”

“I suppose it’s a good short way,” said Miss Sadie, “but it feels queer somehow when applied to scenery or to dead Egyptian kings. ‘
Re
Cheops,’ — doesn’t that strike you as funny?”

“No, I can’t say that it does,” said Stephens.

“I wonder if it is true that the English have less humour than the Americans, or whether it’s just another kind of humour,” said the girl. She had a quiet, abstracted way of talking as if she were thinking aloud. “I used to imagine they had less, and yet, when you come to think of it, Dickens and Thackeray and Barrie, and so many other of the humourists we admire most, are Britishers. Besides, I never in all my days heard people laugh so hard as in that London theatre. There was a man behind us, and every time he laughed auntie looked round to see if a door had opened, he made such a draught. But you have some funny expressions, Mr. Stephens!”

“What else strikes you as funny, Miss Sadie?”

“Well, when you sent me the temple ticket and the little map, you began your letter, ‘Enclosed, please find,’ and then at the bottom, in brackets, you had ‘2 enclo.’”

“That is the usual form in business.”

“Yes, in business,” said Sadie, demurely, and there was a silence.

“There’s one thing I wish,” remarked Miss Adams, in the hard, metallic voice with which she disguised her softness of heart, “and that is, that I could see the Legislature of this country and lay a few cold-drawn facts in front of them, I’d make a platform of my own, Mr. Stephens, and run a party on my ticket. A Bill for the compulsory use of eyewash would be one of my planks, and another would be for the abolition of those Yashmak veil things which turn a woman into a bale of cotton goods with a pair of eyes looking out of it.”

“I never could think why they wore them,” said Sadie; “until one day I saw one with her veil lifted. Then I knew.”

“They make me tired, those women,” cried Miss Adams, wrathfully. “One might as well try to preach duty and decency and cleanliness to a line of bolsters. Why, good land, it was only yesterday at Abou-Simbel, Mr. Stephens, I was passing one of their houses, — if you can call a mud-pie like that a house, — and I saw two of the children at the door with the usual crust of flies round their eyes, and great holes in their poor little blue gowns! So I got off my donkey, and I turned up my sleeves, and I washed their faces well with my handkerchief, and sewed up the rents, — for in this country I would as soon think of going ashore without my needle-case as without my white umbrella, Mr. Stephens. Then as I warmed on the job I got into the room, — such a room! — and I packed the folks out of it, and I fairly did the chores as if I had been the hired help. I’ve seen no more of that temple of Abou-Simbel than if I had never left Boston; but, my sakes, I saw more dust and mess than you would think they could crowd into a house the size of a Newport bathing-hut. From the time I pinned up my skirt until I came out, with my face the colour of that smoke-stack, wasn’t more than an hour, or maybe an hour and a half, but I had that house as clean and fresh as a new pine-wood box. I had a
New York Herald
with me, and I lined their shelf with paper for them. Well, Mr. Stephens, when I had done washing my hands outside, I came past the door again, and there were those two children sitting on the stoop with their eyes full of flies, and all just the same as ever, except that each had a little paper cap made out of the
New York Herald
upon his head. But, say, Sadie, it’s going on to ten o’clock, and tomorrow an early excursion.”

“It’s just too beautiful, this purple sky and the great silver stars,” said Sadie. “Look at the silent desert and the black shadows of the hills. It’s grand, but it’s terrible, too; and then when you think that we really
are
, as that dragoman said just now, on the very end of civilisation, and with nothing but savagery and bloodshed down there where the Southern Cross is twinkling so prettily, why, it’s like standing on the beautiful edge of a live volcano.”

“Shucks, Sadie, don’t talk like that, child,” said the older woman, nervously. “It’s enough to scare any one to listen to you.”

“Well, but don’t you feel it yourself, Auntie? Look at that great desert stretching away and away until it is lost in the shadows. Hear the sad whisper of the wind across it! It’s just the most solemn thing that ever I saw in my life.”

“I’m glad we’ve found something that will make you solemn, my dear,” said her Aunt. “I’ve sometimes thought —— Sakes alive, what’s that?”

From somewhere amongst the hill shadows upon the other side of the river there had risen a high shrill whimpering, rising and swelling, to end in a long weary wail.

“It’s only a jackal, Miss Adams,” said Stephens. “I heard one when we went out to see the Sphinx by moonlight.”

But the American lady had risen, and her face showed that her nerves had been ruffled.

“If I had my time over again I wouldn’t have come past Assouan,” said she. “I can’t think what possessed me to bring you all the way up here, Sadie. Your mother will think that I am clean crazy, and I’d never dare to look her in the eye if anything went wrong with us. I’ve seen all I want to see of this river, and all I ask now is to be back at Cairo again.”

“Why, Auntie,” cried the girl, “it isn’t like you to be faint-hearted.”

“Well, I don’t know how it is, Sadie, but I feel a bit unstrung, and that beast caterwauling over yonder was just more than I could put up with. There’s one consolation, we are scheduled to be on our way home to-morrow, after we’ve seen this one rock or temple, or whatever it is. I’m full up of rocks and temples, Mr. Stephens. I shouldn’t mope if I never saw another. Come, Sadie! Good-night!”

“Good-night! Good-night, Miss Adams!” and the two ladies passed down to their cabins.

Monsieur Fardet was chatting, in a subdued voice, with Headingly, the young Harvard graduate, bending forward confidentially between the whiffs of his cigarette.

“Dervishes, Mister Headingly!” said he, speaking excellent English, but separating his syllables as a Frenchman will. “There are no Dervishes. They do not exist.”

“Why, I thought the woods were full of them,” said the American.

Monsieur Fardet glanced across to where the red core of Colonel Cochrane’s cigar was glowing through the darkness.

“You are an American, and you do not like the English,” he whispered. “It is perfectly comprehended upon the Continent that the Americans are opposed to the English.”

“Well,” said Headingly, with his slow, deliberate manner, “I won’t say that we have not our tiffs, and there are some of our people — mostly of Irish stock — who are always mad with England; but the most of us have a kindly thought for the mother country. You see, they may be aggravating folk sometimes, but after all they are our
own
folk, and we can’t wipe that off the slate.”

“
Eh bien!
” said the Frenchman. “At least I can say to you what I could not without offence say to these others. And I repeat that there
are
no Dervishes. They were an invention of Lord Cromer in the year
1885.”

“You don’t say!” cried Headingly.

“It is well known in Paris, and has been exposed in
La Patrie
and other of our so well-informed papers.”

“But this is colossal,” said Headingly.

“Do you mean to tell me, Monsieur Fardet, that the siege of Khartoum and the death of Gordon and the rest of it was just one great bluff?”

“I will not deny that there was an emeute, but it was local, you understand, and now long forgotten. Since then there has been profound peace in the Soudan.”