Preparations for a Voyage

We are giving our minds to a name for our dahabeëh.
The owners have desired us to christen it, and the task is getting heavy. Whatever we are doing; guiding a donkey through the mazes of a bazaar; eating oranges at the noon breakfast; watching the stream of color and fantastic apparel, swaying camels and dashing harem-equipage with running saïses and outriding eunuchs, flowing by the hotel; following a wedding procession in its straggling parade, or strolling vacantly along, knocked, jostled, evaded by a dozen races in a dozen minutes and lost in the whirl, color, excitement of this perpetual masquerade, we are suddenly struck with, “what shall we call that boat?”

We want a name that is characteristic of the country and expressive of our own feelings, poetic and not sentimental, sensible and not common-place. It seems impossible to suggest a good name that is not already borne by a dahabeëh on the river – names such as the Lotus, the Ibis, the Gazelle, Cleopatra, Zenobia, names with an Eastern flavor. And we must have not only a name for the boat, but a motto or device for our pennant, or “distinguisher flag,” as the dragoman calls the narrow fifty feet long strip of bunting that is to stream from the forward yard. We carry at the stern the flag of our country, but we float our individuality in the upper air. If we had been a bridal party we should of course have taken some such device as that of a couple who went up the river under the simple but expressive legend of “Nestle-down,” written on their banner.

What would you name a Nile dahabeëh?

The days go all too rapidly for us to catch the shifting illusions about us. It is not so much what we see of the stated sights that can be described, but it is the atmosphere in which we live that makes the strangeness of our existence. It is as if we had been born into another world. And the climate is as strange as the people, the costumes, the habits, the morals. The calendar is bewitched. December is a mixture of September and July. Alas, yes. There are the night-fogs of September, and the mosquitoes of July. You cannot tell whether the season is going backwards or forwards. But for once you are content to let Providence manage it, at least so long as there is a north wind, and you forget that the sky has any shade other than blue.

And the prophecy of the poet is realized. The nights are filled with music, and the cares that infest the day are invariably put off till tomorrow, in this deliciously procrastinating land.

[…]

But it is drawing towards the middle of December; there are signs that warn us to be off to the south. It may rain. There are symptoms of chill in the air, especially at night, and the hotel, unwarmed, is cheerless as a barn, when the sun does not shine. Indeed, give Cairo the climate of London in November and everybody would perish in a week. Our preparations drift along. It is always “tomorrow.” It requires a week to get the new name of the boat printed on a tin. The first day the bargain for it is made; the work is to be finished bookra, tomorrow. Next day the letters are studied. The next the tin is prepared. The next day is Friday or Wednesday or some other day in which repose is required. And the next the workman comes to know what letters the howadji desires to have upon the tin, and how big a sign is required.

Two other necessary articles remain to be procured; rockets and other fire-works to illuminate benighted Egypt, and medicines. As we were not taking along a physician and should find none of those experimenting people on the Nile, I did not see the use of carrying drugs. Besides we were going into the one really salubrious region of the globe. But everybody takes medicines; you must carry medicines. The guide-book gives you a list of absolutely essential, nasty drugs and compounds, more than you would need if you were staying at home in an artificial society, with nothing to do but take them, and a physician in every street.

I bought chunks of drugs, bottles of poisons, bundles of foul smells and bitter tastes. And then they told me that I needed balances to weigh them in. This was too much. I was willing to take along an apothecary’s shop on this pleasure excursion; I was not willing to become an apothecary. No, I said, if I am to feed out these nauseous things on the Nile, I will do it generously, according to taste, and like a physician, never stinting the quantity. I would never be mean about giving medicine to other people. And it is not difficult to get up a reputation for generosity on epsom salts, rhubarb and castor oil.

We carried all these drugs on the entreaty of friends and the druggist, who said it would be very unsafe to venture so far without them. But I am glad we had them with us. The knowledge that we had them was a great comfort. To be sure we never experienced a day’s illness, and brought them all back, except some doses that I was able to work off upon the crew. There was a gentle black boy, who had been stolen young out of Soudan, to whom it was a pleasure to give the most disagreeable mixtures; he absorbed enormous doses as a lily drinks dew, and they never seemed to harm him. The aboriginal man, whose constitution is not weakened by civilization, can stand a great amount of doctor’s stuff. The Nile voyager is earnestly advised to carry a load of drugs with him; but I think we rather overdid the business in castor-oil; for the fact is that the people in Nubia fairly swim in it, and you can cut the cane and suck it whenever you feel like it.

By all means, go drugged on your pleasure voyage. It is such a cheerful prelude to it, to read that you will need bluepills, calomel, rhubarb, Dover’s powder, James’s powder, carbolic acid, laudanum, quinine, sulphuric acid, sulphate of zinc, nitrate of silver, ipecacuanha, and blistering plaster. A few simple directions go with these. If you feel a little unwell, take a few blue pills, only about as many as you can bold in your hand; follow these with a little Dover’s powder, and then repeat, if you feel worse, as you probably will; when you rally, take a few swallows of castor-oil, and drop into your throat some laudanum; and then, if you are alive, drink a dram of sulphuric acid. The consulting friends then generally add a little rice-water and a teaspoonful of brandy.

In the opinion of our dragoman it is scarcely reputable to go up the Nile without a store of rockets and other pyrotechnics. Abd-el-Atti should have been born in America. He would enjoy a life that was a continual Fourth of July. He would like his pathway to be illuminated with lights, blue, red, and green, and to blaze with rockets. The supreme moment of his life is when he feels the rocket-stick tearing out of his hand. The common fire-works in the Mooskee he despised; nothing would do but the government-made, which are very good. The passion of some of the Egyptians for fire-arms and gunpowder is partially due to the prohibition. The government strictly forbids the use of guns and pistols and interdicts the importation or selling of powder. On the river a little powder and shot are more valued than money.
We had obtained permission to order some rockets manufactured at the government works, and in due time we went with Abd-el-Atti to the bureau at the citadel to pay for them. The process was attended with all that deliberation which renders life so long and valuable in the East.

We climbed some littered and dusty steps, to a roof terrace upon which opened several apartments, brick and stucco chambers with cement floors, the walls whitewashed, but yellow with time and streaked with dirt. These were government offices, but office furniture was scarce. Men and boys in dilapidated gowns were sitting about on their heels smoking. One of them got up and led the way, and pulling aside a soiled curtain showed us into the presence of a bey, a handsomely dressed Turk, with two gold chains about his neck, squatting on a ragged old divan at one end of the little room; and this divan was absolutely all the furniture that this cheerless closet, which had one window obscured with dust, contained. Two or three officers were waiting to get the bey’s signature to papers, and a heap of documents lay beside him, with an inkhorn, on the cushions. Half-clad attendants or petitioners shuffled in and out of the presence of this head of the bureau. Abd-el-Atti produced his papers, but they were not satisfactory, and we were sent elsewhere.

Passing through one shabby room after another, we came into one dimmer, more stained and littered than the others. About the sides of the room upon low divans sat, cross-legged, the clerks. Before each was a shabby wooden desk which served no purpose, however, but to hold piles of equally shabby account books. The windows were thick with dust, the floor was dirty, the desks, books, and clerks were dirty. But the clerks were evidently good fellows, just like those in all government offices – nothing to do and not pay enough to make them uneasy to be rich. They rolled cigarettes and smoked continually; one or two of them were casting up columns of figures, holding the sheet of paper in the left hand and calling each figure in a loud voice (as if a little doubtful whether the figure would respond to that name); and some of them wrote a little, by way of variety. When they wrote the thin sheet of paper was held in the left hand and the writing done upon the palm (as the Arabs always write); the pen used was a blunt reed and the ink about as thick as tar. The writing resulting from these unfavorable conditions is generally handsome.

Our entry and papers were an event in that office, and the documents became the subject of a general conversation. Other public business (except the cigarettes) was suspended, and nearly every clerk gave his opinion on the question, whatever it was. I was given a seat on a rickety divan, coffee was brought in, the clerks rolled cigarettes for me and the business began to open; not that anybody showed any special interest in it, however. On the floor sat two or three boys, eating their dinner of green bean leaves and some harmless mixture of grease and flour; and a cloud of flies settled on them undisturbed. What service the ragged boys rendered to the government I could not determine. Abd-el-Atti was bandying jocularities with the clerks, and directing the conversation now and then upon the rockets.

In course of time a clerk found a scrap of paper, daubed one side of it with Arabic characters, and armed with this we went to another office and got a signature to it. This, with the other documents, we carried to another room much like the first, where the business appeared to take a fresh start; that is, we sat down and talked; and gradually induced one official after another to add a suggestion or a figure or two. Considering that we were merely trying to pay for some rockets that were ready to be delivered to us, it did seem to me that almost a whole day was too much to devote to the affair. But I was mistaken. The afternoon was waning when we went again to the Bey. He was still in his little “cubby,” and made room for me on the divan. A servant brought coffee. We lighted cigarettes, and, without haste, the bey inked the seal that hung to his gold chain, wet the paper and impressed his name in the proper corner. We were now in a condition to go to the treasury office and pay.

I expected to see a guarded room and heavily bolted safes. Instead of this there was no treasury apartment, nor any strong box. But we found the “treasury” walking about in one of the passages, in the shape of an old Arab in a white turban and faded yellow gown. This personage fished out of his deep breast-pocket a rag of a purse, counted out some change, and put what we paid him into the same receptacle. The Oriental simplicity of the transaction was pleasing. And the money ought to be safe, for one would as soon think of robbing a derweesh as this yellow old man.

The medicine is shipped, the rockets are on board, the crew have been fitted out with cotton drawers, at our expense, (this garment is an addition to the gown they wear), the name of the boat is almost painted, the flags are ready to hoist, and the dahabeëh has been taken from Boulak and is moored above the drawbridge. We only want a north wind.

from My Winter on the Nile, among Mummies and Moslems
by Charles Dudley Warner, 1875