To These Dancers A Couple Of Fellows Were Playing On A Drum And A
Little Banjo.
They were singing a chorus, which was not only
singular, and perfectly marked in the rhythm, but exceeding sweet
in the tune.
They danced in a circle; and performers came trooping
from all quarters, who fell into the round, and began waggling
their heads, and waving their left hands, and tossing up and down
the little thin rods which they each carried, and all singing to
the very best of their power.
I saw the chief eunuch of the Grand Turk at Constantinople pass by-
-(here is an accurate likeness of his beautiful features {2}) - but
with what a different expression! Though he is one of the greatest
of the great in the Turkish Empire (ranking with a Cabinet Minister
or Lord Chamberlain here), his fine countenance was clouded with
care, and savage with ennui.
Here his black brethren were ragged, starving, and happy; and I
need not tell such a fine moralist as you are, how it is the case,
in the white as well as the black world, that happiness (republican
leveller, who does not care a fig for the fashion) often disdains
the turrets of kings, to pay a visit to the "tabernas pauperum."
We went the round of the coffee-houses in the evening, both the
polite European places of resort, where you get ices and the French
papers, and those in the town, where Greeks, Turks, and general
company resort, to sit upon uncomfortable chairs, and drink
wretched muddy coffee, and to listen to two or three miserable
musicians, who keep up a variation of howling for hours together.
But the pretty song of the niggers had spoiled me for that
abominable music.
CHAPTER XV: TO CAIRO
We had no need of hiring the country boats which ply on the
Mahmoodieh Canal to Atfeh, where it joins the Nile, but were
accommodated in one of the Peninsular and Oriental Company's fly-
boats; pretty similar to those narrow Irish canal boats in which
the enterprising traveller has been carried from Dublin to
Ballinasloe. The present boat was, to be sure, tugged by a little
steamer, so that the Egyptian canal is ahead of the Irish in so
far: in natural scenery, the one prospect is fully equal to the
other; it must be confessed that there is nothing to see. In
truth, there was nothing but this: you saw a muddy bank on each
side of you, and a blue sky overhead. A few round mud-huts and
palm-trees were planted along the line here and there. Sometimes
we would see, on the water-side, a woman in a blue robe, with her
son by her, in that tight brown costume with which Nature had
supplied him. Now, it was a hat dropped by one of the party into
the water; a brown Arab plunged and disappeared incontinently after
the hat, re-issued from the muddy water, prize in hand, and ran
naked after the little steamer (which was by this time far ahead of
him), his brawny limbs shining in the sun:
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