First, The Women, Draped In Black Veils, Who Come Daily To Draw The
Precious Water, Have Forsaken The Fragile Amphorae
Of baked earth,
which had come to them from barbarous times - and which the
Orientalists grossly abused in their picture;
And in their stead have
taken to old tin oil-cans, placed at their disposal by the kindness of
the big hotels. But they carry them in the same easy graceful manner
as erstwhile the discarded pottery, and without losing in the least
the gracious tanagrine outline.
And then there are the great tourist boats of the Agencies, which are
here in abundance, for Assouan has the privilege of being the terminus
of the line; and their whistlings, their revolving motors, their
electric dynamos maintain from morning till night a captivating
symphony. It might be urged perhaps against these structures that they
resemble a little the washhouses on the Seine; but the Agencies,
desirous of restoring to them a certain local colour, have given them
names so notoriously Egyptian that one is reduced to silence. They are
called Sesostris, Amenophis or Ramses the Great.
And finally there are the rowing boats, which carry passengers
incessantly backwards and forwards between the river-banks. So long as
the season remains at its height they are bedecked with a number of
little flags of red cotton-cloth, or even of simple paper. The rowers,
moreover, have been instructed to sing all the time the native songs
which are accompanied by a derboucca player seated in the prow. Nay,
they have even learnt to utter that rousing, stimulating cry which
Anglo-Saxons use to express their enthusiasm or their joy: "Hip! Hip!
Hurrah!" and you cannot conceive how well it sounds, coming between
the Arab songs, which otherwise might be apt to grow monotonous.
*****
But the triumph of Assouan is its desert. It begins at once without
transition as soon as you pass the close-cropped turf of the last
square. A desert which, except for the railroad and the telegraph
poles, has all the charm of the real thing: the sand, the chaos of
overthrown stones, the empty horizons - everything, in short, save the
immensity and infinite solitude, the horror, in a word which formerly
made it so little desirable. It is a little astonishing, it must be
owned, to find, on arriving there, that the rocks have been carefully
numbered in white paint, and in some cases marked with a large cross
"which catches the eye from a greater distance still"(sic). But I
agree that the effect of the whole has lost nothing.
In the morning before the sun gets too hot, between breakfast and
luncheon to be precise, all the good ladies in cork helmets and blue
spectacles (dark-coloured spectacles are recommended on account of the
glare) spread themselves over these solitudes, domesticated as it were
to their use, with as much security as in Trafalgar Square or
Kensington Gardens. Not seldom even you may see one of them making her
way alone, book in hand, towards one of the picturesque rocks - No.
363, for example, or No.
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