Let me, therefore, briefly record my life
in the Nubian Desert, at a time when I was filled with the hopes and
ambitions which led Bruce, in the last century, to the fountains of the
Blue Nile, and but a few years since guided Speke and Grant, Sir Samuel
Baker, and Stanley to the great basin of the major river, and determined
the general geography of the equatorial regions.
It was in the middle of January, after a pleasant journey up the Nile
from Lower Egypt, on board a luxuriously fitted up "dahabeah," that I
arrived at Korosko, a Nubian village about a thousand miles from the
Mediterranean. The ascent of the Nile was simply a prolonged feast in
this comfortable sailing-craft, with the panorama of imposing temples
and gigantic ruins relieving the dreary monotony of the river-banks. The
valley of this ancient stream, from the First Cataract, where it ceases
to be navigable, to Cairo, is remarkable alone to the traveler for its
vast structures and mausoleums. The _sikeahs_ and _shadofs_, which are
employed to raise water from the river, in order that it may be used for
irrigation, suggest that no improvement has been made in Egyptian
farming for four thousand years. But the smoke curling away from tall
chimneys, and the noise of busy machinery in the midst of extensive
fields of sugarcane, remind us that Egypt has become one of the greatest
sugar-producing powers of the East. From the site of ancient Memphis to
Korosko, comprising about six degrees of latitude, the soil under
cultivation rarely extends beyond the distance of a mile into the
interior, while to eastward and westward is one vast, uninhabited waste,
the camping-ground of the Bedouins, who roam from river to sea in
predatory bands, leading otherwise aimless lives.
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