One fine morning, some two weeks after my introduction to Tom, I vacated my post in the consul’s household and set about laying plans for a journey up the Nile. My wages had not been reckoned on the American scale, but for all that I was a man of comparative affluence when I turned off the Moosky for my last visit to the headquarters of “the union.”

The German is nothing if not systematic, be he prime minister or errant adventurer. The Teutonic tramp does not wander at random through lands of which his knowledge is chaotic or nil. He profits by the experience of his fellow-ramblers. If he covers an unknown route, he returns with a notebook full of information for his fellows. Thanks to this method, the German beggar colony of Cairo had long contained a bureau of information to which many a vagabond of other nationality bewailed his linguistic inability to gain access. The archives of “the union” were particularly rich in Egyptian lore. For there is but one route in Egypt. He who has once journeyed up or down the Nile, with open eyes, is an authority on the whole country.

Several of die Kunde were romping about on as many vermin colonies when I entered, on this February afternoon, the room in which Pia was accustomed to pen his eleemosynary masterpieces. It was an informal and chance gathering that included nearly every authority in “the union” on the territory beyond the Tombs of the Mamelukes. My projected journey awakened great interest in all the group.

“As for myself,” said Pia, “I can’t see why you go. Most of the comrades do, of course, but they will make the journey worth while. As for a man who will only work! Pah! You will starve and die in the sands up there.”

The emaciated door was kicked open and a burly young man entered and threw himself across the foot of one of the cots.

“Ah, now,” Pia went on, “there is Heinrich. He is going up the Nile too, in a few days. He’s been up six times already. Why don’t 216you go up with him? He knows all the ropes and you, being an American—”

“Was!” roared the newcomer, “Ein Amerikaner? Going up the river? Shake, mein lieber! We go up together! We’ll do more business—”

“But if I go up, I’ll spend considerable time sight-seeing—”

“Sights? There’s something I never could understand. All the tourists go up to see sights! Thank the Lord they do; what would the business be without them? But what the devil do they see? Hundreds of miles of dry, choking sand, with nothing but dirty Nile water to wash it off your face and out of your throat! A lot of smashed-up rocks, covered with pictures of hens and roosters, all red hot under the cursed sun that never stops blazing. And besides that, niggers—millions of dirty niggers, blind niggers, and half-blind niggers who do nothing but crawl around after decent white men and beg. That’s all there is in Egypt, if you go up the Nile, till you come to the sudd-fields of Uganda.”

“Well what do you go up for?” I asked. Even this brief acquaintance with Heinrich convinced me that he would die the death of a martyr rather than disgrace die Kamaraden by working.

“What for? Why so I won’t starve, to be sure. If I could wiggle the feather and paint like Otto there, I’d see hell freeze over before I’d move a mile south of Cairo. But I can’t, so I must go over the soft-hearted ones again. I’ve worked ’em pretty hard the last two years, but the game’s good yet. I’ve grown this beard since the last trip, and got a new story all bolstered up. I’m a civil engineer this time, with a wife and three children here in Cairo. Going up, I’ll be making for the Berber-Suakim line, after spending all I had on the kid’s doctor bills. Coming down, it’s the fever story—that’s always good—or my wife is dying and, if we can get her back to Hamburg before she croaks, she’ll get an inheritance her uncle just left her. Pretty neat that, eh?” grinned Heinrich, turning to his admiring mates. “Thought that out one night when I couldn’t sleep. Brand new, isn’t it? Aber, Gott, mein lieber,” he addressed me once more, “if you’ll only come along! I can’t speak English, and most of the soft ones know my face. But I’ll point out everyone of them from here to Assuan. I’ll lay low and we’ll share even.”

A woman of Alexandria, Egypt, carrying two bushels of oranges. Even barefooted market-women wear the veil required by the Koran

On the top of the largest pyramid. From the ground it looks as sharply pointed as the others

I declined to enter into an offensive alliance against the “soft ones,” however, and turned to Pia for the information which he had once promised to give me. While he talked, every other lounger in the room 217added his voice from time to time; and from deep wells of experience I gleaned a long list of names, flanked by biographical details, as we journeyed mentally up the river. This vagabond’s edition of “Who’s Who in Egypt” completed, Pia laid down several rules of the road.

“I don’t see why you go up,” he began. “You can make a fortune right here. If you are determined to go, get a good story and always stick to it, changing it enough to fit different cases. Some, it will pay you to ask for work—you know the breed; others, just ask for money. Take anything they give you. You can sell it if you don’t want it. Always see the big men long before train time. They will often offer to buy you a ticket to wherever you want to go; and, if the train is soon due, they may go to the station and buy it. But if you touch them long before train time, they may give you the money and go back to business. Then you can spend a couple of piastres to the next station and work that the same way. The sugar factories are all good—they’ll even give you work, perhaps, if you are fool enough to take it. Always hit the young Englishmen. They’re almost all of them adventurers with nothing much to do with their money. When you catch a missionary, make him take up a collection for you among the native Christians. He must do it, by the rules of the Board of Missions.

“The ticket game is always best. If you get three or four men in each town to give you the price to Assiut or Assuan, you can make the trip in a month and pick up good money. When you get a lot of silver, change it at any of Cook’s offices into gold sovereigns and sew them up in your clothes. Be sure not to let any money rattle when you’re spinning a hard-luck yarn. And don’t be a fool, like some of the comrades who have gone up for one trip. They pump a town dry, and, not satisfied to wait until they hit Cairo again, go on a blow-out and lie around drunk for a week where those who gave them ticket money can see them. That queers the burg for the next six months. Of course you know enough to be of the same church, and very pious, when you hit a missionary, and to be from the same state when you touch an American? Above all never let a boat load of tourists go by without touching them. Always go down to the dock and make enough noise so that they all hear you. Some of the boys who are good at it throw a fit when they get in a crowd of rich ones. But as you talk English, a good tale of woe will do as well. When you get well up the river, and a good tan, and a couple of weeks’ beard, spring the old yarn of ‘lost my job and must get down to Cairo.’ 218And always wait for a train. You’ll miss the whole game if you walk; and you’ll die of sunstroke, besides.”

In the face of Pia’s warning, I left Cairo on foot the next morning, and, crossing the Nile, turned southward along a ridge of shifting sand beyond the village of Gizeh. Along an irrigating ditch, that flanked the ridge, scores of shadufs, those human paradigms of perpetual motion, were ceaselessly dipping, dipping, the water that gives life to the fields of Egypt. Between the canal and the sparkling Nile, groups of fellahs, deaf to the blatant sunshine, set out sugar cane or clawed the soil of the arid plain. On the desert wind rode the never-ceasing squawk of the sakka, or Egyptian water-wheel.

Beyond the pyramids of Sakkara, I sought shelter in the palm groves that cover the site of ancient Memphis, and took my siesta on the recumbent statue of Rameses. A backsheesh-thirsty village rose up to cut off my return to the sandy road, and forced me to run a gauntlet of out-stretched hands. ’Tis the national anthem of Egypt, this cry of backsheesh. Workmen at their labor, women bound for market, children rooting in the streets, drop all else to surge after the faranchee who may be induced to “sprinkle iron” among them. Even the unclothed infant astride a mother’s shoulder thrusts forth a dimpled hand to the passing white man with a gurgle of “sheesh.”

As darkness came on I reached the railway station of Mazgoona, some thirty miles from Cairo. The village lay far off to the eastward; but the station master invited me to supper and spread a quilt bed in the telegraph office.

A biting wind blew from the north when I set out again in the morning. A hundred yards from the station, a cry of “monsoor” was borne to my ears, and a servant summoned me back to his master’s office.

“I have just received a wire,” said the latter, “from the division superintendent. He is coming on the next train. Wait and ask him for a job.”

A half-hour later there stepped from the north-bound express, not the grey-haired man I had expected, but a beardless English youth who could not have been a day over twenty. It was a new experience to apply for work to a man younger than myself, but I respectfully stated my case.

“I haven’t a vacancy on my division just at present,” said the boy. “There is plenty of work in Assiut, though. Want to go that far south?”

“Along the way shadoofs were ceaselessly dipping up the water that gives life to the fields of Egypt”

The “Tombs of the Kings” from the top of the Libyan range, to which I climbed above the plain of Thebes

219“Yes,” I answered.

He drew a card from his pocket and scribbled on it two fantastic Arabic characters.

“Take the third-class coach,” he said, handing me the pass. “This covers my division; but you might drop off in Beni Suef and look about.”

Following his advice, I halted near noonday at that wind-swept village. There was no need to make inquiry for the European residents; they were all duly recorded in the “comrades’ Baedeker.” As in Cairo, however, they offered money in lieu of work, and clutched weakly at the nearest support when I refused it. A young Englishman, inscribed in my notes as “Bromley, Pasha, Inspector of Irrigation; quite easy,” gave me evening rendezvous on the bank of the canal beyond the village. Long after dark he appeared on horseback, attended by two natives with flaming torches, and, being ferried across the canal, led the way towards his dahabeah, anchored at the shore of the Nile.

“I fancied I’d find something to put you at,” he explained, as he turned his horse over to a jet-black groom who popped up out of the darkness, “but I didn’t, and the last train’s gone. I’ll buy you a ticket to Assiut in the morning.”

“I have a pass,” I put in.

“Oh,” said the Englishman, “well, you’ll put up with me here to-night, anyway.”

He led the way across the gangplank. The change from the bleak wastes of African sand to this floating palace was as startling as if Bromley, Pasha, had been possessor of Aladdin’s lamp. Richly-turbaned servants, in spotless white gowns, sprang forward to greet their master; to place a chair for him; to pull off his riding boots and replace them with slippers; to slip the Cairo daily into his hands; and sped noiselessly away to finish the preparation of the evening meal. Had Bromley, Pasha, been a fellow countryman, I might have enjoyed the pleasure of his company instead of dining alone in the richly-furnished anteroom. But Englishmen of the “upper classes” are not noted for their democratic spirit, and the good inspector, no doubt, dreaded the uncouth table manners of a plebeian from half-civilized America.

Breakfast over, next morning, I returned to the village and departed on the south-bound express. The third-class coach was densely packed with huddled natives and their unwieldy cargo; all, that is, except the bench around the sides, on which a trio of gloomy Arabs, denied the privilege of squatting on the floor, perched like fowls on a 220roost. The air that swept through the open car was as wintry as the Egyptian is wont to experience. Only the faces of the males were uncovered. The women, wrapped like mummies in fold after fold of black gowns, crouched utterly motionless, well-nigh indistinguishable from the bundles of baggage. Even the guard, wading through the throng, brought no sign of life from the prostrate females; for their tickets were invariably produced by a male escort.

The congestion was somewhat relieved at the junction of the Fayoum branch. The men who had reached their destination rose to their feet, struggled to extricate their much-tied bundles, and rolled them over their fellow travelers and down the steps. Not a female stirred during this unwonted activity of her lord and master. When he had safely deposited his more valuable chattels on the platform, he returned to grasp her by the hand and drag her unceremoniously out the door.

Around the train swarmed hawkers of food. Dates, boiled eggs, baked fish, oranges, and soggy bread-cakes, in quantity sufficient to have supplied an army, were thrust upon whomever ventured to peer outside. From the neighboring fields came workmen laden down with freshly cut bundles of sugar cane, to give the throng the appearance of a forest in motion. Three great canes, as long and unwieldy as bamboo fish rods, sold at a small piastre, and hardly a native in the car purchased less than a half-dozen. By the time we were off again, the coach had been converted into a fodder bin.

The canes were broken into two-foot lengths, and each purchaser, grasping a section in his hands, bit into it, and, jerking his head from side to side like a bulldog, tore off a strip. Then with a sucking that was heard above the roar of the train, he extracted the juice and cast the pulp on the floor about him. At each station, new arrivals squatted on the festive remnants left by their predecessors and spat industriously at the valleys which marked the resting places of the departed. The pulp dried rapidly, and by noonday the floor of the car was carpeted with a sugar-cane mat several inches thick.

My pass ran out in the early afternoon, and I set off to canvass the metropolis of upper Egypt. Several Europeans had already expressed their regrets when, towards evening, I caught sight of the stars and stripes waving over an unusually large building. I turned in at the gate and made inquiry of a native grubbing in the yard.

“Thees house?” he cried, “you not know what thees is? Thees American Hospital.”

221I drew out my notes. Beneath the name of the hospital appeared this entry:—“Dr. Henry and Dr. Bullock, Americans; easy marks; very religious.”

“Come and see house,” invited the native. “Very beeg.”

He led the way to one side of the building, where nearly a hundred natives, suffering with every small ailment from festered legs to toothache, were huddled disconsolately about the office stairway.

“Thees man come get cured,” said my guide. “Thees not sick nuff go bed. American Doctors very good, except”—and his voice dropped to a whisper—“wants all to be Christian.”

The patients filed into the office, emerged with cards in their hands, and crowded about the door of the dispensary. As the last emaciated wretch limped away, a slender, middle-aged white man descended the steps.

“Thees Dr. Henry,” whispered the native. “Doctor, thees man be American.”

I tendered my letter of introduction from the American consulate.

“A mechanical engineer!” cried the doctor. “Fine! Just the man we are looking for. Come with me.”

An engineer I was not—of any species. That profession had been forced upon me by the carelessness of Mr. Morgan’s secretary. But there flashed suddenly across my mind the saying of an erstwhile employer in California:—“When you’re looking for work, never admit there’s anything you can’t do.” I followed after the doctor.

At the rear of the establishment, Dr. Bullock and a well-dressed native were superintending the labors of a band of Egyptians, grubbing about the edge of a large reservoir.

“Now, here is the problem,” said the older man, when he had introduced me to his colleague. “This reservoir is our water supply. It is filled by the inundations of the Nile. But towards the end of the dry season the water gets so low that our force-pump will not raise it. The native engineer whom we have called in is a graduate of the best technical school in Cairo. But—ah—er”—his voice fell low—“you know what natives are? Now what do you suggest?”

Compelled to spar for wind, I asked to be shown the pump and to have the reservoir sounded. The native engineer hung on our heels, listening for any words of wisdom that might fall from my lips. Fortunately, I had once seen a similar difficulty righted.

“There are two possible solutions of the trouble,” I began, in an authoritative voice, swinging round until the native appeared on the 222edge of my field of vision. “The first is to buy a much more powerful pump”—the native scowled blackly—“the second is to build a smaller reservoir halfway up, get another small pump, and—er—relay the water to the top.” The engineer was smiling blandly at the doctors’ backs. “Now the first would be costly. The second requires only a few yards of pipe, a cheap pump, and a bit of excavating.”

“Ah!” cried the native, rushing forward, “That is my idea exactly, only I did not wish to say—”

“Bah!” interrupted Dr. Henry, “Your idea! Why don’t you fellows ever have an idea until someone else gives you one? I’m glad. Dr. Bullock, that we’ve got a man at last who—”

“Yes,” I repeated, “I should put in two pumps, by all means.”

“I’ll send in the order to Cairo to-night,” said the doctor. “Bring your men in the morning, efendee, and set them to digging the reservoir. You don’t need another man to help you on that, I hope?”

“You will find little work in Assiut, just now,” he went on, as we entered the hospital. “By all means go to Assuan. There is employment for every class of mechanic on the barrage. I suppose two dollars will about cover your fee?” He dropped four ten-piastre pieces into my hand. “But you must stay to supper with us. We have one bed unoccupied, too; but three men have died in it in the past month, and if you are superstitious—”

“Not in the least,” I protested.

I rose long before daylight next morning, and groped my way to the station. A ticket to Luxor took barely half my fee as consulting engineer. At break of day, the railway crossed to the eastern bank, and at the next station the train stood motionless while driver, trainmen, and passengers executed their morning prayers in the desert sand. Beyond, the chimneys of great sugar refineries belched forth dense clouds of smoke, and at every halt shivering urchins offered for sale the crude product of the factories, cone-shaped lumps, dark-brown in color.

The voice of the south spoke more distinctly with every mile. We were approaching, now, the district where rain and dew are utterly unknown. The desert grew more arid, the whirling sand finer, more penetrating. The natives, already of darker hue than the cinnamon-colored Cairene, grew blacker and blacker. The chilling wind of two days past turned tepid, then piping hot, and, ere we drew into Luxor, Egypt lay, as of old, under her mantle of densest sunshine.

A water-carrier of Luxor. A goatskin full costs one cent

The tourist colony of Luxor, housed in two great faranchee hotels, 223would be incomplete without a rendezvous for “the comrades.” Close by the station squats a tumble-down shack, styled the “Hotel Economica,” wherein, dreaming away his old age over a cigarette, sits Pietro Saggharia. Pietro was a “comrade” once. His tales of “the road,” gleaned in forty years of errant residence in Africa, and couched in almost any tongue the listener may choose, are to be had for a kind word, even while the exiled Greek is serving the forbidden liquor to backsliding Mohammedans and the white wanderers who take shelter beneath his roof.

I left my knapsack in Pietro’s keeping and struck off for the great ruins of Karnak. The society intrusted with the preservation of the monuments of upper Egypt has put each important ruin in charge of a guardian, and denies admittance to all who leave Cairo without a ticket issued by the society. The price thereof is little short of a vagabond’s fortune. I journeyed to Karnak, therefore, resolved to be content with a view of her row of sphinxes and a circuit of her outer walls.

About the approach to the ancient palaces the seekers after backsheesh held high court. Before I had shaken off the last screeching youth, I came upon a great iron gate that shut out the unticketed, and paused to peer through the bars for a glimpse of the much-heralded interior. On the ground before the barrier squatted a sleek, well-fed native. He rose and announced himself as the guard; but made no attempt to drive me off.

“You don’t see much from here,” he said, in Arabic, as I turned away. “Have you already seen the temple? Or perhaps you have no ticket?”

“La, ma feesh,” I replied; “therefore I must stay outside.”

“Ah! Then you are no tourist?” smiled the native. “Are you English?”

“Aywa,” I answered, for the Arabic term “inglesi” covers all who speak that tongue, “but no tourist, merely a workingman.”

“Ah,” sighed the guard, “too bad you are an inglesi then; for if you spoke French, the superintendent of the excavations is a good friend of workingmen. But he speaks no English.”

“Where shall I find him?”

“In the office just over the hill, there.”

I took the direction indicated, and came upon a temporary structure, before which an aged European sat motionless in a rocking chair. 224About him was scattered a miscellaneous collection of statues, broken and whole.

“Are you the superintendent, sir?” I asked, in French.

The octogenarian frowned, but answered not a word. I repeated the question in a louder voice.

“Va t’en!” shrieked the old man, grasping a heavy cane that leaned against his chair and shaking it feebly at me. “Go away! You’re a beggar. I know you are.”

Evidently the fourth layer of shirt bosom, uncovered specially for the occasion, had failed in its mission. I pleaded a case of mistaken identity. The aged Frenchman watched me with the half-closed eyes of a cat, clinging to his stick.

“Why do you want to see the superintendent?” he demanded.

“To work, if he has any. If not, to see the temple.”

“You will not ask him for money?”

“By no means.”

“Bien! En ce cas—Maghmoód,” he coughed.

A native appeared at the door of the shanty.

“My son is the superintendent,” said the old man, displaying a grotesque pattern of wrinkles that was meant for a smile. “Follow Maghmoód.”

The son, an affable young Frenchman attired in the thinnest of white trousers and an open shirt, was bowed over a small stone covered with hieroglyphics. I made known my errand.

“Work?” he replied, “No. Unfortunately the society allows us to hire only natives. I wish I might have a few Europeans to superintend the excavations. But I am always pleased to find a workman interested in the antiquities. You are as free to go inside as if you had a ticket. But it is midday now. How do you escape a sunstroke with only that cap? You had better sit here in the shade until the heat dies down a bit.”

I assured him that the Egyptian sun had no evil effects upon me and he stepped to the door to shout an order to the sleek gatekeeper just out of sight over the hill. That official grinned knowingly as I appeared, unlocked the gate, and, fending off with one hand several elusive urchins, admitted me to the noonday solitude of the forest of pillars.

As the shadows began to lengthen, a flock of “Cookies” invaded the sacred precincts, and, stumbling through the ruins in pursuit of 225their shepherds, two dragomans of phonographical erudition, awoke the dormant echoes with their bleating. With their departure, came less precipitous mortals, weighed down under cameras and notebooks. Interest centered in one animated corner of the enclosure. There, in the latest excavation, an army of men and boys toiled at the shadufs that raised the sand and the water which the sluiceways poured into the pit to loosen the soil. Other natives, naked but for a loin-cloth, groped in the mud at the bottom, eager to win the small reward offered to the discoverer of each arch?ological treasure.

One such prize was captured during the afternoon. A small boy, half buried in the ooze, suddenly ceased his wallowing with a shrill shriek of triumph; and came perilously near being trampled out of sight by his fellow-workmen. In a twinkling, half the band, amid a mighty uproar of shouting and splashing, was tugging at some heavy object still hidden from view.

They raised it at last,—a female figure in blue stone, some four feet in length, which had suffered downfall, burial, and the onslaughts of the Arab horde without apparent injury. The news of the discovery was quickly carried to the shanty on the hill. In a great pith helmet that gave him a striking resemblance to a walking toadstool, the superintendent hurried down to the edge of the pit and gave orders that the statue be carried to a level space, about which a throng of excited tourists lay in wait with open notebooks. There it was carefully washed with sponges, gloated over by the aforementioned tourists, and placed on a car of the tiny railway system laid through the ruins. Natives, in number sufficient to have moved one of Karnak’s mighty pillars, tailed out on the rope attached to the car, and, moving to the rhythm of a weird Arabic song of rejoicing, dragged the new find through the temple and deposited it at the feet............