William Arnold Bromfield

On board the Nile Boat Mary Victoria, about 8 miles below Dekkeh, Nubia. January 5th, 1851.

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My dear E

An opportunity will be given me on our arrival at Wady Halfeh (the second Cataract,) or perhaps sooner, of dispatching these two letters to Cairo. I am extremely vexed at being in a position which debars me, and has so long debarred me, from receiving news of you; but I am thankful at the same time, that the channel of communication homewards has not been cut olF, so that I can allay your anxiety from time to time, by means of Government or travellers' boats returning to Cairo.

We are now wending our way slowly, but surely, to that Ultima Thule of most Egyptian travellers, the second Cataract at Wady Halfeh, enjoying the sun and warmth of the tropic which we passed yesterday about noon, near Kalabshee. The evenings are no longer anything like so chilly as they were but a few days since: but the mornings are as fresh still as in England, and cool for the latitude. At Assouan, where we arrived on the 30th, we had a very violent gale of wind for nearly twenty -four hours, from the northward, which made the air feel quite chilly all day on the 31st, and filled the atmosphere with sand from the desert.

We expect to reach Wady Halfeh in four or five days; from whence we propose setting out with six camels, our two servants Ameen and Mohammed, our Egyptian cook Saad, and one or two of the boat's crew, for Dongola and Meroe, about fifteen days journey into the interior. We are promised plenty of sport, gazelles and other game; and in a large island in the Nile called Argo, there is a solitary hippopotamus well known to the natives, who can at any time find out his haunts, and point him out to strangers. To him we mean to pay a visit, and if possible shoot him, but they say, he bears a charmed life, and laughs at balls, dozens of which his impenetrable hide has defied already, so we can hardly hope to carry olf his head for a trophy; still it will be something to see a hippopotamus in his native wilds.

Our servants and crew (with the exception of the cook Saad, who is an Egyptian, and a Coptic Christian), being all Nubians, are delighted at finding themselves in their own country, and our young reis and the pilot have already visited their native villages, where we allowed them to go ashore to their friends for a few hours. Ameen, as a native of Meroe, and Mohammed, of Dongola, are quite overjoyed at the prospect of seeing their remote homes once more, for the love of country is very strong among the Nubians.

We have engaged the pilot who conducts our little bark through the intricate navigation of the river between the first and second cataracts, to take charge of the boat at Wady Halfeh for two piastres per diem, (about four pence sterling,) during our expedition to the interior of Nubia, or more properly, into the Berber country, for Nubia Proper is included in the district between the first and second Cataracts. This pilot, we took on board at Assouan, where his contract was signed, sealed, and delivered with due form and ceremony before the Turkish authorities in our presence. We purchased an excellent tent of a most obliging Frenchman named Venderg, a gun merchant, on his way down the river to Cairo from Kordufan with a cargo of that article; for which we paid only the small sum of 200 piastres, or about £2 sterling. We shall leave most of our clothing and other things in the boat, taking no more than is absolutely necessary for the expedition, which will occupy us a month at least; and probably six weeks will elapse before we return to Wady Halfeh, and commence our return voyage down the Nile. We do not expect to fare very luxuriously on our route, but we take with us a good supply of rice, coffee, and maccaroni, and our guns w T ill continue no doubt, as heretofore, to furnish our larder with wild fowl, and, as I hope, venison also, for meat is not to be looked for in Nubia, and is execrably bad all over Egypt, with a few occasional exceptions. Poultry, we shall no doubt, be able to procure now and then, should our supply of game run short, and excellent vegetables my fellow travellers can always enjoy, for the valley of the Nile is one vast uninterrupted kitchen garden, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the second cataract, a distance of a thousand miles; and I believe it continues to be such a garden of herbs far beyond that point into Abyssinia. In this land of ancient Ethiopia, or the Cush of Scripture, where we now are, the wheat and barley are at present, nearly a yard high, but not as yet in ear; though they will be ready for the sickle in March. The maize and Guinea corn harvest is just concluded, and the cotton, of which great quantities are grown from below Thebes upwards, is in flower, and young pod. Senna, both wild and cultivated, is a great article of transmission hence to Cairo and Alexandria for exportation to Europe, and the Khenna shrub, so much used for dyeing the nails and hands red, is another valuable production of Nubia, and plentifully adorns the banks of the Nile; whilst whole fields of onions, lentils, lettuces, beans, lupins, peas, radishes, and most of the remaining vegetables of Lower Egypt, cover both sides of the river in this narrow valley of Nubia, besides tobacco, the castor oil plant, and a host of leguminosa3 unknown in British gardens, such as ochroes, cocoas, &c. &c.

On we glide daily towards the south, under a gloriously bright unclouded sky, and a delicious temperature that scarcely any one would at present consider in the least oppressive: but when we get fairly within the tropics as at Meroe in 19° lat. the advancing season will soon begin to make itself felt, and we must expect very hot weather a month or six weeks hence, and to experience the Khamseen winds in full force on or before our arrival at Cairo.

Here already, above the first cataract, the population has much diminished, the villages are smaller, fewer, and farther apart, the inhabitants are darker than in Egypt, and most of them go all but quite naked, and are usually armed with a spear and shield; they are more independent in their bearing than the fellahs of Egypt, and more cleanly in their habits. The valley of the Nile between the cataracts is pretty, but somewhat monotonous; a very narrow strip of highly cultivated land on each side of the river, often not a hundred yards wide, separating the latter from the boundless deserts of moving sand: but the rude grandeur of the granite and sandstone rocks is in many parts extremely imposing, especially at Assouan, and above the cataract at Philas, and higher up. The scenery of the first cataract itself, is extremely fine, and has been likened with some truth to that of Glengariff in Ireland.

I am collecting and drying all the plants I can find in the valley of the Nile from Alexandria to our farthest limit, and regret exceedingly not having brought out a set of my own drying boards, with a copious supply of paper and mill-boards, as I am reduced to using a very i inferior and troublesome apparatus lent me by Mr. Trail; my own little boards being far two small to be of any service, and I have been forced to put up with a very coarse paper, purchased from time to time at the various towns along the Nile: since however, the sun is rarely obscured, or hides his face for a moment, in this climate, I can manage to dry the specimens very fairly with paper which it would be hardly possible to make use of otherwise, with the limited quantity I have at command; but the drying of the plants goes on speedily and uninterruptedly the whole day long, by placing the boards strapped together on the roof of our boat's cabin in the sun, which of course, is never off the roof between the times of rising and setting; a heavy stone being laid on the boards to give additional pressure; and the whole being taken in at night, on account of the dews which are sometimes very heavy on the river.

From October to April is the vegetating season in Upper Egypt and Nubia: from the middle of April, to the middle or end of September, the great heat and drought arrest the growth of, and wither up herbaceous plants of most kinds; but the very few indigenous trees, being naturally evergreen, resist the intense heat of the long, sultry, cloudless summer, uninjured. The flora of the Nile valley to its termination in Nubia, is of a singularly northern character: more than nine tenths of the entire vegetation being made up of annual or perennial herbaceous plants of an ordinary looking weedy character, strongly contrasting with the tropical type of the cultivation, sugar, indigo, sessame, cotton, Guinea com, &c. The number of species is not great, and many of the plants are extremely social or gregarious, which is very unusual in countries so near the equator. Few of the plants of Egypt, and (as far as I have yet seen), of Nubia, have much beauty of blossom, brightness of colour, or gracefulness of form; and they are almost all, either scentless, or unpleasant in odour. The mere lovers of " wild flowers" would find themselves grievously disappointed in Egyptian botany; to them the country would be a flowerless land; but to me, this peculiarity is extremely interesting, proving, what I have always advanced, that there is no necessary inseparable connection between warmth of climate, intense and continuous solar light, and a richly coloured, and varied vegetation; as otherwise, how can it be accounted for that the rich, damp, alluvial soil of the Nile, and the dry hot sands beyond, are incapable of sustaining a vegetation equally varied and luxuriant as that of our own bleak fields at home, or half the number of pretty flowering-plants on the same area of ground ? Not a few of the Egyptian and Nubian plants are common weeds in England, or, if not identical in species, belonging to the same genera with our own, and are not a whit more handsome in form and colour, or superior in size to their British congeners. It is not a little strange to find the hosts of warm aromatic sub-shrubs and perennials, that so abound on the shores of Spain, the south of France, Greece and other countries of the Mediterranean, disappearing almost entirely on the still more southerly and sunny valley of the Nile, where they are replaced by a few sparingly distributed tropical, or sub-tropical plants, whilst the remaining vegetation is of a type more plain and northern than that of the countries just named. The same northern type prevails in the other departments of nature's creation. Very few of the birds have much beauty of colouring, and those commonly seen, are either identical with, or are related to the species with which we are familiar in England, such as the common sparrow, the grey wagtail, the Eoyston crow, the sky lark, which abounds in every field in Lower and Central Egypt, the Nile plover, very like our common peewit, (also a native,) turtle doves, blue rock pigeons, besides the kestrel, hen-harrier, and various other hawks identical with, or closely resembling British species, as are the owl, kingfisher, and many of the water fowl, some of which latter, as the flamingo, egrets, &c, are common to this country and southern Europe. Of course, there are many birds exclusively African, as pelicans, paddy-birds, &c, but these are seldom distinguished by any elegance or gaiety of plumage: although of course there are certain exceptions to this general sobriety of colouring. As regards insects, I will only mention, that of the few butterflies that flit about the fields of this land of unclouded sunshine and high temperature, that which is by far the most frequently seen, is our English painted lady (Cynthias Cardui), a species common with us in certain years during the latter part of summer and autumn; I have noticed as yet but a single insect of this order at all superior in size to the largest of our English lepidoptera: the rest few in number, as regards the species, and not greatly abounding individually, do not exceed our native butterflies either in point of size, or beauty of colouring; which is another proof of the j position before alluded to.

January 7th, We are drawing very near to Korosko, and to Deyr, now the capital of Nubia, at both which places we shall arrive tomorrow if the wind is in our favour, which it will probably be, as the reign of the north wind seems now established for the season. To day we did not make much progress, having been obliged to track most part of it, as, in this tranquil climate, the wind is perpetually falling to calm, and the bends and windings of the river are continually rendering a fair wind a contrary one, and vice versa. The day after tomorrow we shall probably see Abousembal, or Ipsambul, one of the finest remains of Egyptian temples existing; and on the 10th or 11th, we hope to reach the foot of the second cataract at Wacly Halfeh, where we shall probably remain two or more days, to hire camels, and procure some necessaries for our journey into the interior. Will you tell Mr. Lawrence that I am collecting seeds of every kind that I can meet with, including some of the vegetables grown in Egypt for the table, which are curious; but most, if not all of them, are like the fruits, much inferior to those of our own land, and this, when even of the same species with English ones, as cabbages, carrots, lettuces, &c., but the onions are greatly superior to ours in size and mildness. I intend to forward to England from Cairo all the seeds I shall have collected up to the date of my transmitting my dried Flora of the valley of the Nile: as I cannot of course, travel into Syria encumbered with these bulky and perishable articles.

Although we are now between the tropics, the nights are chilly, obliging us to keep the doors of our cabin closed towards evening: the mornings too, for a couple of hours before and after sunrise are disagreeably cool, and even during the whole of this morning till about 1 p.m. the fresh northerly breeze drove Mr. P. and myself to sit in the sun at the fore part of the boat for warmth. We now seldom see a sail besides our own; we are at this moment moored as usual for the night under the steep westward bank of the mighty river whose current we have been stemming for forty three days, through nearly a thousand miles of boundless desert on either hand, and which in this part of our course is never half a mile from either bank, mostly within a hundred yards; and in many places, you have but to reach the tops of one or other of the banks, to find yourself at once amidst the sand-drifts and savage rocks, that with but few interruptions stretch across the whole of this vast continent of Africa. The views indeed of the desert as we glide onward, are extremely picturesque in every part of the Nile valley, but most particularly so on approaching the first cataract, when vast masses of dark coloured rocks rise from the ocean of white, yellow, or reddish sand into rugged hills piled in unimaginable confusion one upon another, the palm and acacia-clad banks of the Nile running like two narrow edgings of lightest green along an undulating band of silver, for the river here is much clearer than lower down its course, even in Upper Egypt. At this hour (10 o'clock p.m.) my two fellow-travellers have retired to their berths, the reisj crew, and our servants are all stretched on the deck of the boat, or on that of our cabin over our heads, wrapped up in their blankets, capote, or other garments protecting them from the cold night air, fast asleep; whilst the only sounds heard are the chirping of crickets on the bank above us, and the melancholy howl, or yell of troops of roving jackalls in the adjacent desert It is the rapid radiation from the boundless waste of treeless and herbless sand and rock into the dry unclouded heavens, which goes on unceasingly from sunset to sunrise, that causes the extraordinary and trying inequality of temperature between day and night, which, at this season more particularly, is one of the few inconveniences of which travellers have to complain in this climate. Such is the extreme dryness of the air in the desert, that a plant I gathered in my walk to day, though only carried in the hand for about an hour and a half, was by the time I returned on board the boat, utterly unfit for pressing, not being merely withered, but actually dried up, parched and crisped, as if it had been put into an oven.

Korosko, Tropical Nubia, January 8th, a little below Deyr. We are lying here, made fast under the steep bank of the river for the night, in company with two boats belonging to Mr, Melly of Liverpool, who with his family (his wife, a daughter, and two sons), is absent on a trip to Kordufan, from whence lie is not expected back for three months: the boats in the meantime awaiting his return at Korosko, which is the nearest point of departure for that province.

This is a very small poor place, but the emporium of the caravans from Kordufan with goods destined for the Egyptian capital.

And now I fear that I must maintain an unwilling silence for some weeks, till we again return from living in tents, and journeying on camels through deserts and barbarous tribes, to our snugger and more civilized mode of life on board the Mary Victoria.

With kindest regards to all friends, Believe me, always, Your affectionate Brother, William Arnold Bromfield.

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