My Winter on the Nile

Charles Warner

Charles Dudley Warner

My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

O Commander of the Faithful. Egypt is a compound of black earth and green plants, between a pulverized mountain and a red sand. Along the valley descends a river, on which the blessing of the Most High reposes both in the evening and the morning, and which rises and falls with the revolutions of the sun and moon. According to the vicissitudes of the seasons, the face of the country is adorned with a silver wave, a verdant emerald, and the deep yellow of a golden harvest.

From Amrou, Conqueror of Egypt, to the Khalif Omar.

PREFATORY NOTE

“My Winter on the Nile,” and its sequel, “In the Levant,” which record the experiences and observations of an Oriental journey, were both published in 1876; but as this volume was issued only by subscription, it has never reached the large public which is served by the general book trade.

It is now republished and placed within the reach of those who have read “In the Levant.” Advantage has been taken of its reissue to give it a careful revision, which, however, has not essentially changed it. Since it was written the Khedive of so many ambitious projects has given way to his son, Tufik Pasha; but I have let stand what was written of Ismail Pasha for whatever historical value it may possess. In other respects, what was written of the country and the mass of the people in 1876 is true now. The interest of Americans in the land of the oldest civilization has greatly increased within the past few years, and literature relating to the Orient is in more demand than at any previous time.

The brief and incidental allusion in the first chapter to the peculiarity in the construction of the oldest temple at Pæstum—a peculiarity here for the first time, so far as I can find, described in print—is worthy the attention of archaeologists. The use of curved lines in this so-called Temple of Neptune is more marked than in the Parthenon, and is the secret of its fascination. The relation of this secret to the irregularities of such mediaeval buildings as the Duomo at Pisa is obvious.

Hartford, October, 1880.

C. D. W

CHAPTER I.—AT THE GATES OF THE EAST

THE Mediterranean still divides the East from the West. Ages of traffic and intercourse across its waters have not changed this fact; neither the going of armies nor of embassies, Northmen forays nor Saracenic maraudings, Christian crusades nor Turkish invasions, neither the borrowing from Egypt of its philosophy and science, nor the stealing of its precious monuments of antiquity, down to its bones, not all the love-making, slave-trading, war-waging, not all the commerce of four thousand years, by oar and sail and steam, have sufficed to make the East like the West.

Half the world was lost at Actium, they like to say, for the sake of a woman; but it was the half that I am convinced we never shall gain—for though the Romans did win it they did not keep it long, and they made no impression on it that is not, compared with its own individuality, as stucco to granite. And I suppose there is not now and never will be another woman in the East handsome enough to risk a world for.

There, across the most fascinating and fickle sea in the world—a feminine sea, inconstant as lovely, all sunshine and tears in a moment, reflecting in its quick mirror in rapid succession the skies of grey and of blue, the weather of Europe and of Africa, a sea of romance and nausea—lies a world in Everything unlike our own, a world perfectly known yet never familiar and never otherwise than strange to the European and American. I had supposed it otherwise; I had been led to think that modern civilization had more or less transformed the East to its own likeness; that, for instance the railway up the Nile had practically “done for” that historic stream. They say that if you run a red-hot nail through an orange, the fruit will keep its freshness and remain unchanged a long time. The thrusting of the iron into Egypt may arrest decay, but it does