From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
OF PALMS AND SUNSETS
If any one were to say that the scenery of the Nile Valley from Cairo to Assuân is monotonous, I wonder what would be the proper reply to him. For that matter, indeed, one may well wonder what is the proper reply to anybody who says that anything is monotonous. What is monotony? Is it a quality of the object perceived or of the percipient subject? Is it in the seer or in the seen? If we endeavour to assign an objective origin to it we soon find ourselves in the cleft-stick of the alternative conclusions either that all is monotony or that nothing is monotonous. The waking life of the eye, for instance, is simply an endless succession of visual perceptions; and what monotony could be more profound than that. On the other hand, it is a succession of visual perceptions of which no two between the cradle and the grave exactly resemble each other: and what better example of infinite variety could there be than that? Hence, to use Socrates's phrase of hypocritical sympathy with a confuted adversary, "we seem in danger of having to admit" that monotony must be in ourselves and cannot be in the world without. It is, in fact, our own personal contribution to the sum of things. It is a portion of that inexhaustible fund of "tediousness" which, in the liberal spirit of Chief Constable Dogberry, we handsomely bestow upon the Cosmos.
To the man who sees no difference between one human being and another a London street is monotonous, as are the Alps to him who finds every peak and pass and glacier exactly like the last. Thus, then, if any one pleases to say, as some have been heard to say, that the Nile Valley up to the First Cataract is a mere tiresome succession of palm trees and mud villages, a perpetual panorama of long levels of greenest verdure, broken every here and there by reaches of yellow sandbank, with an eternal foreground of bright-blue river and an everlasting background of grey or red gold mountains, it would be idle to gainsay him. If that is all that there seems to him to be on the Nile, then that is all that the Nile is—for him. A palm-tree "by the river brim" has no more charm—for the wrong sort of eye—than a primrose in the same situation. Nay, if any man fails to find a beauty in the very monotony, as he would doubtless call it, of this stately plumed procession sweeping slowly past him for six hundred miles of river—if he does not feel to the very core of his being their indefinable harmony with man and nature in these regions, their indissoluble affinity with the wilderness which they fringe, and with the ancient world-relics amid which they stand, the attempt to impress him with it would be vain. But if by chance he does feel it, he will no more find monotony on the banks of the Nile than he could find it in the heaven of unchanging stars.
The peculiar glamour of the palm is, like most other such mysterious appeals to the imagination through the senses, hard to seize and analyse. Yet it is undeniable and unmistakable. In all ages it has captured the romantic temperament and stormed the citadel of the poet's heart. Heine's exquisite lyric, with its image of the northern pine-tree dreaming in the frozen silence of its brother the palm in the burning sands of the desert, does not stand alone, though it does stand before all others. And the tree is as dear to those races who are native to its soil as to the poets and artists of the North.
Tu tambien insigne palma
Eres aqui forestiera.
"Thou, too, O noble palm," ran the sweet, sad lament of the Moorish captive in Spain; "thou, too, art a stranger in this land even as I." For him the palm of Southern Europe was a mere exotic flourishing only in such latitudes under exceptionally favourable conditions, and the prisoner sighed for the towering stems and spreading frondage of his African home. Perhaps there was something more than mere nostalgic prejudice in his plaintive cry. "We do it wrong, being so majestical," to set the palm in the midst of European vegetation. Its charm, no doubt, is largely of the spiritual and imaginative order—a charm depending not only upon perfect accord with its surroundings, but upon unchallenged supremacy therein. It is the child of solitude and the brother of sterility. Its natural companions are the sandhill and the limestone rock, or at best those rare low-lying shrubs of the desert that lift up no head to a tenth part of its full stature. Even the green floor of the Nile banks seems almost alien to it, and it needs that same "monotonous" background of mountain and wilderness to keep it "in the picture."
But so placed, as it is here, the eye must be strangely incurious and unappreciative that finds any lack of variety in the landscape wherein the palm plays so continual a part. Those who charge it with sameness are deceived by its mere uniformity of general outline. Architecturally speaking, it must be admitted that this famous tree is simplicity itself. The irreverent have been known to compare it to a mop which has earned its right to retirement by long and wearing services; and, indeed, the broad resemblance between stem and handle, drooping fronds and well-worn mop-head, could hardly escape the eye of a child. Comparing it, for instance, with the countless shapes assumed by the English tree which stands first for beauty of line—the beech—one might have thought it beyond the power even of so inventive an artist as Nature to get much variety out of the endless repetition of this simple figure. Nature, however, has signally triumphed over these difficulties of her own creation. without varying, except within very narrow limits, the form of the palm, she varies its angle of growth, its grouping, its artistic function and significance in the scene with a fertility of invention which seems inexhaustible. There is no tree which lends itself to so great a number or so manifold a variety of decorative purposes in landscape, none which "composes" so well, in the artist's phrase, as the palm. Alone, in groups of two or three, in clumps of a dozen or a score, in widely scattered "plantations" of fifty to a hundred, in thickest groves of double or treble that number, its effect is equally satisfying, and its value to the eye alike inestimable in all. Its simplest dispositions are full of charm and of command.
Simplicity, indeed, may almost be said to constitute the chief and abiding fascination of Nile scenery as a whole; the broadest effects, produced by the slenderest of means, abound. Here, before me, at an ordinary bend of the river—one among thousands of others so like, yet so unlike it—is an example ready to hand. On the narrow spit of land that thrusts itself lance-like into the broad bosom of the waters stands a little group of palms, the guardians of a tiny Arab village. Shorewise from their roots runs a long narrow strip of intensely vivid green. Inland, for miles behind it, the "lone and level sands stretch far away," their dusty yellow melting gradually at the horizon into the pearl-grey of the morning sky. In midstream a single lateen-sail hovers over the glassy surface of the river, like some huge water-fowl, motionless, blinding white. There is nothing more; it is the very slightest of impressionist sketches, dashed off as it were in half a dozen strokes of Natures most careless brush; but it is perfect with a perfection of its own, and is of the kind which lives long in the memory of the eye. In every such delightful vignette of river scenery—and at every turn of the Nile there is a fresh one—the palm is the dominant feature. And unlike so many other trees which require a strong light to be seen at their best, its beauty is the same at all hours. It is beautiful with all its midday grace of line when other trees have become mere masses of darkening shadow under the gloaming; and it is the first to trace itself against the dawn-grey of the Eastern heaven. The fir itself shows not more nobly when the sunset flames behind its stem; nor is there anywhere so "adorable a dreamer" in the moonlight.
But the Nile has something more wonderful to show than the scenery of its shores—something more beautiful than its majestic palms, and more enduring than even its golden mountains. Never elsewhere is the "incomparable pomp of eve" so gorgeous as in the skies which it reflects, and nowhere does the funeral pageant of the departed day defile with such entrancing and long-drawn splendour as across its waters. The Nile sunsets are famous, and every evening of the three weeks we have spent upon the river there was a general muster of the whole strength of our steamers passengers to assist at these magnificent obsequies. Hardly upon a single night of the whole twenty did they disappoint us, and the brilliancy and richness of the colours on which, night after night, we feasted our eyes were not more extraordinary than their inexhaustible variety of scheme. There is not a colour-tube in the artist's paint-box which would not, on one evening or another, have been called into requisition, and there is scarcely one which he would not have found himself mixing on his palette into some new and exquisite combination with another. The hues of the western horizon at the actual moment of the sun's disappearance below it might, no doubt, except in point of intensity, be matched in a colder sky. In England, under fortunate conditions, one has often seen a blaze of sunset glory which it is impossible to outdo, and which no southern or tropical clime could do more than match. It is in the lights and colours of the entire firmament taken as a whole that the difference here is felt, in the far-reaching translucency of the northern and southern quarters of the heaven, and in that sensation of an infinitely widened world which is an effect of the clearness of the atmosphere.
A second point in which a Nile sunset distances all competitors elsewhere is in its performances, so to speak, as a "water colourist." No one who has not seen this artist at work can have the faintest conception of the astonishing feats which he performs with the smooth surface of the river for his sketching-block, or of the daring "slapdash" with which he flings his pigments upon it, or of the transcendent success of the result. He reserved his most startling effect till the very last day of our trip. On that evening the sun went down in a perfect sea of flame, which overflowed into the Nile waters. As good luck would have it, the wake of our steamer was racing straight through this flaming flood, and the waves streamed aft from the paddle-wheels, a deep purple in their hollows and on every rounded crest a bar of ruddy gold. A German artist sat near me desperately dashing in the colours upon his sketching-block as they glowed before him; but if he values his reputation for veracity he will never show any one that sketch when it is finished, for most certainly no one who sees it will believe it.
Yet, after all, it is not so much the actual sunset itself as its sequel which is the miraculous thing. For what words can describe the magic, the long-drawn sweetness, the strange, wild beauty of the Egyptian afterglow? Everywhere, or at least in all latitudes in which this epilogue of the nightly world drama is given at all, it is impressive; but elsewhere it is short in duration and more or less subdued in tone. In the tropics, as is well known, it is the custom to dispense with it altogether. "The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out; at one stride comes the dark," remarks the Ancient Mariner, describing his agitating experiences, and it is for the scientific to explain why six hundred miles up the Nile, on the very threshold of the Tropic of Cancer, the afterglow should last almost thrice as long as it does elsewhere in the temperate zone. But so it is. To call it an epilogue of the mystery play of sunset is perhaps to describe it inadequately. In reality it is an additional and more profoundly interesting act of the great drama. It is the very reverse of the phenomenon depicted in Coleridge's two pregnant lines. The dipping of the sun's rim in these regions is followed by no out-rush of the stars, no striding forward of the dark. On the contrary, after some ten minutes or so of fading twilight, such as in other lands is a mere prelude to complete darkness, the whole heaven suddenly lightens up again.
The grey of dusk almost disappears, and objects near and distant which had been melting into obscurity start once more, as though touched by the wand of an enchanter, into clear and sharply outlined view. It is as though the sun, instead of having just set, were about to rise; it is like the dawn of a new day. Brighter and brighter grows the afterglow, and more and more golden as it brightens, the red rays of the prism which assume such prominence in most European sunsets seeming here—no doubt for some good optical reason, if one only knew it—to be far surpassed in intensity by the yellow. To describe the mysterious, the almost "eerie" light-effect produced by this flood of liquid gold immersing and suffusing the whole earth for long after the sun's disc has disappeared, and while the northern and eastern skies are darkening every minute, is impossible; but the nearest though a distant resemblance to it that one remembers in England is to be found in that unearthly light that sometimes gleams luridly under a brazen-bellied thunder-cloud on a sultry summer afternoon. Things look just as spectral in the Egyptian afterglow as they do with us in one of those storm-laden hours when "wildly dashed on tower and tree, The sunbeam strikes along the world." Only they are thrice as vividly outlined, thrice as solidly projected against their background of earth or sky.
During this reillumining of the landscape the deep orange of the western horizon has glowed steadily and undimmed; but meanwhile the quarter of the heaven lying immediately above it has undergone an astonishing change. "God made himself an awful rose of dawn," wrote Tennyson in the "Vision of Sin," and fastidious critics have been known to object alike to the figure and to the phrase—to the imagery as false, and to the expression as affected. Yet all but the last two words of the description might be applied with perfect truth and sobriety to the afterglow of a sunset on the Nile. For slowly during all this time there has been ascending from the skyline of the desert as its base, and to an altitude of full thirty degrees above it, a glorious arc of the softest rose colour, which melts as it draws nearer to the blue of the zenith into a gradually paling lilac, through the very midst of which looks forth the silver of the evening star. The chastened magnificence, the sober splendour of this atmospheric effect surpasses imagination. It is the very classicism of colour, just as the gorgeous hues of the actual sunset—its splashes of fierce crimson and blazing gold—might stand as typical of the rich exuberance of romance. But the time and space of this aerial marvel, the sphere of its radiance and the spell of its duration, are, perhaps, most wonderful of all. Laterally measured, this arc of glory spans a full quarter of the horizon—from due north-west to a point about midway between west and south. Vertically, as has already been said, it climbs at least one-third of the dome of sky between the horizon and the zenith; and it lasts in flawless and unimpaired beauty for a full half-hour. The sunset orange against which yon passing string of camels and their turbaned leaders are silhouetted black as jet will have faded into purple haze, the evening star will have changed from a rayless speck of silver into a flashing jewel, and the lake of lilac in which it swims will have become blanched and colourless ere that great rose-window through which we have been gazing as into the lighted cathedral of the heavens is itself at last swallowed up in night.