The captain, a Nubian, on a
salary of eighty-five cents a day, selects a suitable spot on the bank
where the boat may remain all night. Then the bow of the boat heads
for the shore and digs her nose in the soft mud. The sailors pitch the
stakes and mallets out on to the bank and spring ashore. Then with
Arab songs which they always sing when rowing, hauling ropes,
scrubbing the decks, or doing any sort of work, the stern is gradually
hauled alongside the bank, and there we stay until morning in a
stillness so absolute that even the cry of the jackals seems in
harmony with the loneliness of it.
I dreaded the first excursion. It was to Memphis and Sakhara, eighteen
miles in all, and I never had been on a donkey in my life. I am not
afraid of horses, but donkeys are so much like mules. My friends
encouraged me all they could. They said that I would have a donkey-boy
all to myself, that the donkey never went out of a walk, and wound up
by the cheerful assurance that if he did pitch me over his head I
would not have far to fall.
The donkey-boys of the Nile deserve a book all to themselves.
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