Chapter XII

“Old King Cole was a merry old soul,

A merry old soul was he,

He called for his pipe, he called for his bowl,

He called for his fiddlers three.”

OLD KING COLE.

* * * * *

ERGOODT.

A squabble. — Arrival of Ismail Pacha Ayoob. — His physician. — His engineer. — Conversation with a pacha. — We invite him to dine. — Cora. — Paul and Virginia. — Music. — A banquet in the desert. — A handsome present. — A British subject. — We reach El Fasher.

NOT many of the habitations of Ergoodt are visible from the plain in which the wells are sunk, but a walk of a few minutes in any direction discloses among the trees numerous tuckles, as well as much cultivated ground. Near the wells stands one large sycamore-tree, and this tree, I found on my arrival, about an hour after the caravan, had been the innocent cause of much squabbling, nearly resulting in blows, between Mohommed Effendi, the lieutenant of the troops, and the village authorities. The latter wanted the shade of the tree in which to build a shed for the use of Ismail Pacha Ayoob, the Governor of Darfoor, who was to arrive that afternoon. The officious and pugnacious little officer claimed it, however, for us. By dint of obstinacy and threats he had carried his point, and the shed had to be built in the sunshine.

Towards one o’clock every villager who possessed a horse rode out, attired in his best apparel, to meet the pacha, who was reported near. In half an hour more he arrived, surrounded by the villagers caracoling their horses round his camel; he entered his shed, and the mob after a time dispersed.

When all was quiet I put on a reserve shirt, and a pair of new red slippers, and walked over the twenty or thirty yards that separated our abodes to pay my respects. The pacha was sitting on his “angereb,” and came out to meet me. His manner was dignified, but jovial; his appearance good-natured, but determined. We entered the shed together, and the inevitable coffee and “chibooks” soon made their appearance.

On a rush mat, spread on the floor, sat the two chief companions of his travels. The one was his physician, a Greek in practice at Khartoom; a short man with a shrewd and dirty face, and long black hair hanging from under a very greasy tarboosh, down to his shoulders. He was very loquacious, and, in saying everything he said, his object was evidently to impress his hearers with the idea that he was a very learned and superior person. The second occupant of the mat on the floor was an old Egyptian engineer of the Public Works Department; fat, smooth, smiling, silent, and humble, with, like the doctor, a dirty face. He held in his hand a map he had made of his journey, and, with a pair of compasses, from time to time made a measurement, with the object of seeming engrossed in his work, just as a boy at school who has been idling his time appears busy and absorbed in his book when the master is in the schoolroom. He held the pacha in great awe, but his awe and humility were only the result of judicious treatment. In the pacha’s youth the engineer had been his tutor, but when, in after years, the pupil grew to be the ruler of provinces, a pacha of many tails, and one of the most powerful men in the country, he rebelled against the authority of his former master. The latter, not relishing this exhibition of independence, had proceeded to rate him soundly, using all the terms of obloquy with which the Egyptian is familiar. The tables were, however, now turned; the rod, or rather the “korbatch,” which the tutor had formerly wielded over the pupil, was now wielded by the pupil over the tutor, who, there and then, received sound personal chastisement at the hands of the pacha. Since this little episode, which I afterwards learned at El Fasher, matters had gone on smoothly: the arrogant master was transformed into the obsequious slave; the pacha was happy in having done a useful action, and, probably, further gratified at having taken revenge for the numerous castigations he had, in youth, received at the hands of his former tyrant.

A general reception now took place. The chiefs, and old men of the village, the Egyptian officers, “mahounds,” and head-men of the camel- drivers, all swarmed round the shed and entered one by one, eager for the honour of kissing and slobbering the hand of the pacha. He bore it all with becoming stoicism, and at the end of the ceremony called for soap and water and washed his hands. Fresh “chibooks” and coffee were brought, and conversation, in which the doctor joined, commenced in French, which the pacha spoke fluently, incorrectly, and with an accent I have never heard equalled, and which is, probably, only to be acquired by long residence in Darfoor, Khordofan, and the still remoter confines of Egyptian territory. He was going home, suddenly recalled, his presence in Cairo being necessitated by the then impending Eastern complications. He was full of his subject, and spoke without reserve of the anticipated war with Russia, with a prescience which events have since proved _not_ prophetic. By easy transition the subject passed to Paul de Kock’s novels, and stories from the _Arabian Nights_, interspersed with original and apposite remarks and jokes, too recondite for me, but at which the Greek doctor, of course, laughed boisterously, and the old engineer, although he understood not a word, laughed too, nearly as loudly.

By this time the other section had arrived, and soon put in an appearance, followed by the Egyptian officers, “mahounds,” &c. &c., when fresh hand-kissing took place, necessitating a further use of soap and water.

Altogether we spent a very lively and pleasant afternoon. After six weeks travelling in the desert, where my liveliest companions were certainly the flies and, latterly, the hunting-spiders, it can easily be conceived that to meet so profound a statesman, so varied a reader, so gifted a linguist, so accomplished a conversationalist, was a great treat, and that I appreciated it accordingly.

It has been my lot in the course of my sojourn in Egypt to visit many Egyptian officials of different ranks, but until it was my happiness to meet with Ismail Pacha Ayoob, I never came across one who could or would _converse_; some are too reticent and suspicious, and others, the greater number, too ignorant to venture beyond their well-worn and beaten track of staple and humdrum commonplace. With the generality of Egyptian pachas, beys, and effendis conversation (I use the word because I can find no other) always resolves itself into inquiries after your health, and that of your father, mother, uncles, sisters, brothers, and cousins, so persistently and earnestly reiterated, that it is nearly impossible to avoid a surmise that the questioner is in league with some quack-doctor, anxious to palm off upon you a patent medicine, or universal ointment. The long spun-out series of kind inquiries finally ended, congratulations upon your having escaped the ills of life, and promises of daily prayer for a continuance of your immunity from every kind of pain, follow in thick profusion, ending with complimentary and personal remarks upon your robust and healthy appearance. Conversation, as above described, may probably last, with occasional intervals of coffee or sherbet, smoke and silence, during which the pacha strokes his chin, for the whole of an afternoon, and any attempt on your part to vary it, by the introduction of other topics, would only lead to hopeless and inextricable confusion. I have no doubt that when the English or Russian ambassador in Constantinople pays a visit to the Sultan similar conversation takes place, on which telegraphic intelligence of the event is despatched to all the capitals in Europe, and articles, speculative, political, and learned, appear in the leading journals, affording to all classes of society subject of comment for at least a week, to be replaced at the expiration of that time by the introduction of other matter of equal importance and of interest as vital.

On one occasion when visiting a pacha, after I had acquired experience of the tedium such a visit always entails, I determined to forestall him, and on entering the room, prevented his firing-off the usual battery of questions concerning my health and that of my relations by telling him, at a sacrifice of truth, of course very reprehensible, but, perhaps, pardonable in this extreme case, that I had been very ill, still continued so, and did not hope to get better, and that, moreover, I was a melancholy orphan, and possessed no relations worth mentioning. This unexpected statement took him flat aback, and, as a full-rigged ship, close-hauled, placed in a similar predicament by a sudden shift of the wind ahead, settles down by the stern, slowly and silently, into the fathomless depths of the ocean, so the pacha settled down in a similar manner slowly and silently into the depths of the cushions on his divan.

As I had effectually dammed the usual outlet for the flood of his stereotyped eloquence, I felt it incumbent upon me to open another channel of conversation, and asked him, after an interval long enough to admit of the subsidence of his sorrow for my misfortunes, whether he thought that the Lualaba river, then recently discovered by Livingstone, and since traced by Stanley to the Atlantic, and proved to be the Congo, was in reality the Nile, as Livingstone thought. The subject was one which interested him. Nilotic exploration was, at that time, popular in Egypt. He replied, after having abstractedly stroked his chin for five minutes, that he thought not, and the reason he gave for his opinion was as original as it was astounding; the new river was on the other side of the equator, and must necessarily have to _flow upwards_, which was an impossibility, before it could reach it. As I was not prepared with maps of the equatorial world to show that some rivers do cross the equator, and would, moreover, have found it difficult to prove to my interlocutor that such a thing was not absolutely impossible, I sank into silence and took my leave after a cup of coffee, and on my way home congratulated myself cordially upon having escaped an afternoon with a pacha.[11]

Our present host was very different, and, to use a forcible expression, was in all respects as jolly as a sandboy. When we got back to our tents we unanimously decided to invite him to dinner, and to give him such a banquet as had never until that time been spread in Darfoor. The invitation was accordingly despatched, begging him, when he came, to bring his concomitants—the doctor and the engineer. Dinner was to be at seven, but he came over at once, followed by the doctor, leaving, however, the engineer behind, and sat down under the tree which had led to so much squabbling in the morning. He brought with him as a present a monkey, although a male, called “Cora,” and two banded ichneumons, Paul and Virginia. The monkey soon grew to be fond of us all, and became a general favourite; the ichneumons never evinced any special regard for anything but eggs, and their method of breaking them, by lifting them up with their fore-paws and dashing them on to the ground, afforded us occasional diversion, which we sometimes enhanced by boiling the eggs hard and serving them up hot. All the three animals were, on our return to England, presented to the Zoological Society, and Cora, rechristened in the label on his door, “Niss-Nass monkey,” became a subject of much interest, and the recipient of many nuts, in the last cage on the right- hand side of the monkey house in the gardens in Regent’s Park. He was there well cared for, grew in stature and improved in appearance, but lost his amiable disposition, and led the other occupant of his cage, a smaller specimen of a different variety, a miserable and altogether unenviable existence. He is now dead. Paul and Virginia, in the small mammal house, flourished for a time, grew sleek and fat, their fur became soft, silky, and handsome, and then they died. It is possible to treat animals too carefully; while they were with us, running about in camp, where they got decidedly more kicks than eggs, they enjoyed life thoroughly, and, although they were not so fat, or their skins so soft, they had perfect health, and under similar treatment might probably have lived till now.

The monkey having been put through his antics, and Paul and Virginia having received a regular “ovation,” the pacha suggested native music, as a novelty, and sent over to the village for musicians. Three little black musical boys soon appeared, bringing with them three pipes, precisely similar to the pipes the three little boys, whom these much resembled, had used on the occasion of the grand _fantasìa_ at Sotaire; exactly as the others had done they arranged themselves in line, advanced and receded, commenced the same lugubrious song, and blew from the pipes the two or three identical notes. As we had all of us seen this sort of _fantasìa_ many times before, we came to the conclusion that it was not a novelty, and the boys were dismissed, receiving, as a reward for their efforts to amuse us, two empty claret-bottles, and an old pocket handerchief, which they tore into three equal parts, one for each musician, before they made their final bow and took their departure.

A few games at backgammom, a game very popular in Egypt, at which I lost three sheep to the pacha, and about half a flock to the doctor, brought us to dinner-time, when our two tables, together with sundry cases of stores, were arranged side by side under a table-cloth, out in the open beneath the tree. The banquet was shortly after served up, and the “menu” was as follows:

Macaroni soup; lentil soup, seasoned with dry mint, resembling pea soup, but far preferable.

Salmon and lobster sauce; Findon haddocks. This course passed off with much _eclât_.

Curried gazelle chops; boiled mutton and caper sauce; carrots and turnips.

Roast guinea fowl and roast doves; peas and asparagus.

Greengage tart, gooseberry tart, Dutch cheese; claret, brandy, whisky, gin, and “invalid”[12] port.

Our banquet was a complete success. The guests, although they did not say grace, looked it very forcibly. The face of the pacha bore an expression of internal thankfulness that was very gratifying to behold, and not at all surprising considering the length of time during which he had lived on boiled “duchn,” grilled mutton, and soldier’s bread. The Greek doctor was equally pleased, and his praises of all he ate and drank were lavish and loud. He so repeatedly drank our healths, on each occasion mixing his liquors, not in the generally accepted sense of the word, but brandying his claret, and ginning his port, that towards the close of the repast he became quite eloquent, and with his brother physician across the table discussed in scientific and glowing terms the characteristic of every disease which it had been his fortune to treat. This was of course very instructive, and we all listened with profound attention, and were very much interested. Short pipes and long pipes were introduced after dinner, and their relative merits were descanted upon. Most of us agreed that the long pipes were better in flavour, but that the objection to them was that to light them without the assistance of a servant was next to impossible. The unintentional hint was enough; the pacha sent for his little slave-boy pipe-lighter, and begged the astonished speaker’s acceptance of him as “backsheesh.” The boy was an accomplished pipe-lighter, and, I am sorry to say, nearly as accomplished a thief; but I wish it to be thoroughly understood that nothing could be further from my intention than to hint, for a moment, that this was the reason of the pacha’s sudden fit of somewhat embarrassing generosity. He remained with us until we got back to Cairo, and stole all our penknives; he was taken to our Consulate, and, after receiving his “letters of marque” as a free and independent British subject, he became, beneath the sheltering ægis of England’s wide and beneficent power, an idle and homeless vagabond upon the face of the earth, and thieved ten times worse than before.

More backgammon, and more lost sheep, brought us into the small hours; and our, by this time, tired guests wished us good-bye, and went home to their shed.

One day more at Ergoodt, then two days’ travelling across a range of stony hills, the Sarghenat, brought us, amid the joyous songs of the camel-drivers, to El Fasher, the stalk and mud metropolis of the ex- Sultanate of Darfoor.

[Decoration]