sweeps are in motion, balanced on outriggers, for the forward deck is filled, and the rowers walk on top of the goods as they move the oars to and fro. How black the rowers are! How black everybody on board is! They come suddenly upon us, like those nations we have read of, who sit in great darkness. The rowers are stalwart fellows whose basalt backs shine in the sun as they bend to the oar; in rowing they walk towards the cabin and pull the heavy oars as they step backwards, and every sweep is accompanied by the burst of a refrain in chorus, a wild response to a line that has been chanted by the leader as they stepped forwards. The passengers sit immoveable in the sun and regard us with a calmness and gravity which are only attainable near the equatorial regions, where things approach an equilibrium.
Sometimes we count nearly one hundred dahabeëhs in sight, each dipping or veering or turning in the sun its bird-wing sail—the most graceful in the world. A person with fancies, who is watching them, declares that the triangular sails resemble quills cut at the top for pens, and that the sails, seen over the tongue of land of a long bend ahead, look like a procession of goose quills.
The day is warm enough to call out all the birds; flocks of wild geese clang overhead, and companies of them, ranks on ranks, stand on the low sand-dunes; there are pelicans also, motionless in the shallow water near the shore, meditating like a derweesh on one leg, and not caring that the thermometer does mark 740. Little incidents entertain us. We like to pass the Dongola, flying “Ohio” from its yard, which took advantage of our stopping for milk early in the morning to go by us. We overhaul an English boat and have a mildly exciting race with her till dark, with varying fortune, the boats being nearly a match, and the victory depending upon some trick or skill on the part of the crew. All the party look at us, in a most unsympathetic manner, through goggles, which the English always put on whenever they leave the twilight of England. I do not know that we have any right to complain of this habit of wearing wire eye-screens and goggles; persons who have it mean no harm by it, and their appearance is a source of gratification to others. But I must say that goggles have a different effect in different lights. When we were sailing slowly past the Englishman, the goggles regarded us with a feeble and hopeless look. But when the Englishman was, in turn, drawing ahead of us, the goggles had a glare of “Who the devil are you?” Of course it was only in the goggles. For I have seen many of these races on the Nile, and passengers always affect an extreme indifference, leaving all demonstrations of interest to the crews of the boats.
The two banks of the river keep all day about the same relative character—the one sterile, the other rich. On the east, the brown sand licks down almost to the water; there is only a strip of green; there are few trees, and habitations only at long intervals. Only a little distance back are the Mokattam hills, which keep a rarely broken and level sky-line for two hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo.
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