The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, Volume 1 Page 27

  Miss Dawkins – Sabrina Dawkins was her name, but she seldom had friends about her intimate enough to use the word Sabrina – was certainly a clever young woman. She could talk on most subjects, if not well, at least well enough to amuse. If she had not read much, she never showed any lamentable deficiency; she was good-humoured, as a rule, and could on occasions be very soft and winning. People who had known her long would sometimes say that she was selfish; but with new acquaintances she was forbearing and self-denying.

  With what income Miss Dawkins was blessed no one seemed to know. She lived like a gentlewoman, as far as outward appearance went, and never seemed to be in want; but some people would say that she knew very well how many sides there were to a shilling, and some enemy had once declared that she was an ‘old soldier’. Such was Miss Dawkins.

  She also, as well as Mr Ingram and M. de la Bordeau, had laid herself out to find the weak side of Mr Damer. Mr Damer, with all his family, was going up the Nile, and it was known that he had room for two in his boat over and above his own family. Miss Dawkins had told him that she had not quite made up her mind to undergo so great a fatigue, but that, nevertheless, she had a longing of the soul to see something of Nubia. To this Mr Damer had answered nothing but ‘Oh!’ which Miss Dawkins had not found to be encouraging.

  But she had not on that account despaired. To a married man there are always two sides, and in this instance there was Mrs Damer as well as Mr Damer. When Mr Damer said ‘Oh!’ Miss Dawkins sighed, and said, ‘Yes, indeed,’ then smiled, and be-took herself to Mrs Damer.

  Now Mrs Damer was soft-hearted, and also somewhat old-fashioned. She did not conceive any violent affection for Miss Dawkins, but she told her daughter that ‘the single lady by herself was a very nice young woman, and that it was a thousand pities she should have to go about so much alone like.’

  Miss Damer had turned up her pretty nose, thinking, perhaps, how small was the chance that it ever should be her own lot to be an unprotected female. But Miss Dawkins carried her point, at any rate as regarded the expedition to the Pyramids.

  Miss Damer, I have said, had a pretty nose. I may also say that she had pretty eyes, mouth, and chin, with other necessary appendages, all pretty. As to the two Master Damers, who were respectively of the ages of fifteen and sixteen, it may be sufficient to say that they were conspicuous for red caps and for the constancy with which they raced their donkeys.

  And now the donkeys, and the donkey-boys, and the dragomen were all standing at the steps of Shepheard’s Hotel. To each donkey there was a donkey-boy, and to each gentleman there was a dragoman, so that a goodly cortège was assembled, and a goodly noise was made. It may here be remarked, perhaps with some little pride, that not half the noise is given in Egypt to persons speaking any other language as is bestowed on those whose vocabulary is English.

  This lasted for half-an-hour. Had the party been French, the donkeys would have arrived only fifteen minutes before the appointed time. And then out came Damer père and Damer mère, Damer fille and Damer fils. Damer mère was leaning on her husband, as was her wont. She was not an unprotected female, and had no desire to make any attempts in that line. Damer fille was attended sedulously by Mr Ingram, for whose demolishment, however, Mr Damer still brought up, in a loud voice, the fag ends of certain political arguments, which he would fain have poured direct into the ears of his opponent, had not his wife been so persistent in claiming her privileges. M. de la Bordeau should have followed with Miss Dawkins, but his French politeness, or else his fear of the unprotected female, taught him to walk on the other side of the mistress of the party.

  Miss Dawkins left the house with an eager young Damer yelling on each side of her; but nevertheless, though thus neglected by the gentlemen of the party, she was all smiles and prettiness, and looked so sweetly on Mr Ingram when that gentleman stayed a moment to help her to her donkey, that his heart almost misgave him for leaving her as soon as she was in her seat.

  And then they were off. In going from the hotel to the Pyramids, our party had not to pass through any of the queer old narrow streets of the true Cairo – Cairo the Oriental. They all lay behind them as they went down by the back of the hotel by the barracks of the Pasha and the College of Dervishes, to the village of old Cairo and the banks of the Nile.

  Here they were kept half an hour, while their dragomans made a bargain with the ferryman, a stately reis, or captain of a boat, who declared with much dignity, that he could not carry them over for a sum less than six times the amount to which he was justly entitled; while the dragomans, with great energy on behalf of their masters, offered him only five times that sum. As far as the reis was concerned, the contest might soon have been at an end, for the man was not without a conscience, and would have been content with five times and a half; but then the three dragomans quarrelled among themselves as to which should have the paying of the money, and the affair became very tedious.

  ‘What horrid, odious men!’ said Miss Dawkins, appealing to Mr Damer. ‘Do you think they will let us go over at all?’

  ‘Well, I suppose they will; people do get over generally, I believe. Abdallah! Abdallah! why don’t you pay the man? That fellow is always striving to save half a piastre for me.’

  ‘I wish he wasn’t quite so particular,’ said Mrs Damer, who was already becoming rather tired; ‘but I’m sure he’s a very honest man in trying to protect us from being robbed.’

  ‘That he is,’ said Miss Dawkins; ‘what a delightful trait of national character it is, to see these men so faithful to their employers!’ And then at last they got over the ferry, Mr Ingram having descended among the combatants, and settled the matter in dispute by threats and shouts, and an uplifted stick.

  They crossed the broad Nile exactly at the spot where the Nilometer, or river gauge, measures from day to day, and from year to year, the increasing or decreasing treasures of the stream, and landed at a village where thousands of eggs are made into chickens by the process of artificial incubation.

  Mrs Damer thought that it was very hard upon the maternal hens – the hens which should have been maternal – that they should be thus robbed of the delights of motherhood.

  ‘So unnatural, you know,’ said Miss Dawkins; ‘so opposed to the fostering principles of creation. Don’t you think so, Mr Ingram?’

  Mr Ingram said he didn’t know. He was again seating Miss Damer on her donkey, and it must be presumed that he performed this feat clumsily; for Fanny Damer could jump on and off the animal with hardly a finger to help her, when her brother or her father was her escort; but now, under the hands of Mr Ingram, this work of mounting was one which required considerable time and care. All which Miss Dawkins observed with precision.

  ‘It’s all very well talking,’ said Mr Damer, bringing up his donkey nearly alongside of that of Mr Ingram, and ignoring his daughter’s presence, just as he would have done that of his boys, or his dog; ‘but you must admit that political power is more equally distributed in England than it is in America.’

  ‘Perhaps it is,’ said Mr Ingram, ‘equally distributed among, we will say, three dozen families,’ and he made a feint as though to hold in his impetuous donkey, using the spur, however, at the same time on the side that was unseen by Mr Damer. As he did so, Fanny’s donkey became equally impetuous, and the two cantered on in advance of the whole party. It was quite in vain that Mr Damer, at the top of his voice, shouted out something about ‘three dozen corruptible demagogues’. Mr Ingram found it quite impossible to restrain his donkey so as to listen to the sarcasm.

  ‘I do believe papa would talk politics,’ said Fanny, ‘if he were at the top of Mont Blanc, or under the falls of Niagara. I do hate politics, Mr Ingram.’

  ‘I am sorry for that, very,’ said Mr Ingram, almost sadly.

  ‘Sorry, why! You don’t want me to talk politics, do you!’

  ‘In America, we are all politicians, more or less; and therefore, I suppose, you would hate us all.’

  ‘Well,
I rather think I should,’ said Fanny; ‘you would be such bores.’ But there was something in her eye, as she spoke, which atoned for the harshness of her words.

  ‘A very nice young man is Mr Ingram; don’t you think so?’ said Miss Dawkins to Mrs Damer. Mrs Damer was going along upon her donkey, not altogether comfortably. She much wished to have her lord and legitimate protector by her side, but he had left her to the care of a dragoman, whose English was not intelligible to her, and she was rather cross.

  ‘Indeed, Miss Dawkins, I don’t know who are nice and who are not. This nasty donkey stumbles at every step. There! I know I shall be down directly.’

  ‘You need not be at all afraid of that; they are perfectly safe, I believe, always,’ said Miss Dawkins, rising in her stirrup and handling her reins quite triumphantly. ‘A very little practice will make you quite at home.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean by a very little practice. I have been here six weeks. Why did you put me on such a bad donkey as this?’ and she turned to Abdallah, the dragoman.

  ‘Him berry good donkey, my lady; berry good – best of all. Call him Jack in Cairo. Him go to Pyramid and back, and mind noting.’

  ‘What does he say, Miss Dawkins?’

  ‘He says that that donkey is one called Jack. If so, I’ve had him myself many times, and Jack is a very good donkey.’

  ‘I wish you had him now with all my heart,’ said Mrs Damer. Upon which Miss Dawkins offered to change, but those perils of mounting and dismounting were to Mrs Damer a great deal too severe to admit of this.

  ‘Seven miles of canal to be carried out into the sea, at a minimum depth of twenty-three feet, and the stone to be fetched from Heaven knows where. All the money in France wouldn’t do it.’ This was addressed by Mr Damer to M. de la Bordeau, whom he had caught after the abrupt flight of Mr Ingram.

  ‘Den we will borrow a leetle from England,’ said M. de la Bordeau.

  ‘Precious little, I can tell you. Such stock would not hold its price in our markets for twenty-four hours. If it were made, the freights would be too heavy to allow of merchandise passing through. The heavy goods would all go round; and as for passengers and mails, you don’t expect to get them, I suppose, while there is a railroad ready made to their hand?’

  ‘Ve vill carry all your ships through vidout any transportation. Think of that, my friend.’

  ‘Pshaw! You are worse than Ingram. Of all the plans I ever heard it is the most monstrous, the most impracticable, the most —’ But here he was interrupted by the entreaties of his wife, who had, in absolute deed and fact, slipped from her donkey, and was now calling lustily for her husband’s aid. Whereupon Miss Dawkins allied herself to the Frenchman, and listened with an air of strong conviction to those arguments which were so weak in the ears of Mr Damer. M. de la Bordeau was about to ride across the Great Desert to Jerusalem; and it might perhaps be quite as well to do that with him, as to go up the Nile as far as the second cataract with the Damers.

  ‘And so, M. de la Bordeau, you intend really to start for Mount Sinai?’

  ‘Yes, mees; ve intend to make one start on Monday veek.’

  ‘And so on to Jerusalem. You are quite right. It would be a thousand pities to be in these countries, and to return without going over such ground as that. I shall certainly go to Jerusalem myself by that route.’

  ‘Vat, mees! you! Vould you not find it too much fatigante?’

  ‘I care nothing for fatigue, if I like the party I am with – nothing at all, literally. You will hardly understand me, perhaps, M. de la Bordeau; but I do not see any reason why I, as a young woman, should not make any journey that is practicable for a young man.’

  ‘Ah! dat is great resolution for you, mees.’

  ‘I mean as far as fatigue is concerned. You are a Frenchman, and belong to the nation that is at the head of all human civilization—’

  M. de la Bordeau took off his hat, and bowed low, to the peak of his donkey saddle. He dearly loved to hear his country praised – as Miss Dawkins was aware.

  ‘And I am sure you must agree with me,’ continued Miss Dawkins, ‘that the time is gone by for women to consider themselves helpless animals, or to be so considered by others.’

  ‘Mees Dawkins vould never be considered, not in any times at all, to be one helpless animal,’ said M. de la Bordeau, civilly.

  ‘I do not, at any rate, intend to be so regarded,’ said she. ‘It suits me to travel alone; not that I am averse to society; quite the contrary; if I meet pleasant people, I am always ready to join them. But it suits me to travel without any permanent party, and I do not see why false shame should prevent my seeing the world as thoroughly as though I belonged to the other sex. Why should it, M. de la Bordeau?’

  M. de la Bordeau declared that he did not see any reason why it should.

  ‘I am passionately anxious to stand upon Mount Sinai,’ continued Miss Dawkins; ‘to press with my feet the earliest spot in sacred history, of the identity of which we are certain; to feel within me the awe-inspiring thrill of that thrice sacred hour.’

  The Frenchman looked as though he did not quite understand her, but he said that it would be magnifique.

  ‘You have already made up your party, I suppose, M. de la Bordeau?’

  M. de la Bordeau gave the names of two Frenchmen and one Englishman, who were going with him.

  ‘Upon my word, it is a great temptation to join you,’ said Miss Dawkins, ‘only for that horrid Englishman.’

  ‘Vat, Mr Stanley?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean any disrespect to Mr Stanley. The horridness I speak of does not attach to him personally, but to his stiff, respectable, ungainly, well-behaved, irrational, and uncivilized country. You see I am not very patriotic.’

  ‘Not quite so much as my dear friend Mr Damer.’

  ‘Ha! ha! ha! an excellent creature, isn’t he? And so they all are, dear creatures. But then they are so backward. They are most anxious that I should join them up the Nile, but—’ and then Miss Dawkins shrugged her shoulders gracefully, and, as she flattered herself, like a Frenchwoman. After that they rode on in silence for a few moments.

  ‘Yes, I must see Mount Sinai,’ said Miss Dawkins, and then sighed deeply. M. de la Bordeau, notwithstanding that his country does stand at the head of all human civilisation, was not courteous enough to declare that if Miss Dawkins would join his party across the desert, nothing would be wanting to make his beatitude in this world perfect.

  Their road from the village of the chicken-hatching ovens lay up along the left bank of the Nile, through an immense grove of lofty palm trees, looking out from among which our visitors could ever and anon see the heads of the two great Pyramids; that is, such of them could see it as felt any solicitude in the matter.

  It is astonishing how much things lose their great interest as men find themselves in their close neighbourhood. To one living in New York or London, how ecstatic is the interest inspired by these huge structures. One feels that no price would be too high to pay for seeing them, as long as time and distance, and the world’s inexorable task-work, forbid such a visit. How intense would be the delight of climbing over the wondrous handiwork of those wondrous architects so long since dead; how thrilling the awe with which one would penetrate down into their interior caves – those caves in which lay buried the bones of ancient kings, whose very names seem to have come to us almost from another world!

  But all these feelings become strangely dim, their acute edges wonderfully worn, as the subjects which inspired them are brought near to us. ‘Ah! so those are the Pyramids, are they?’ says the traveller, when the first glimpse of them is shown to him from the window of a railway carriage. ‘Dear me; they don’t look so very high, do they? For Heaven’s sake put the blind down, or we shall be destroyed by the sand.’ And then the ecstacy and keen delight of the Pyramids has vanished, and forever.

  Our friends, therefore, who for weeks past had seen them from a distance, though they had not yet visited them, d
id not seem to have any strong feeling on the subject as they trotted through the grove of palm-trees. Mr Damer had not yet escaped from his wife, who was still fretful from the result of her little accident.

  ‘It was all the chattering of that Miss Dawkins,’ said Mrs Damer. ‘She would not let me attend to what I was doing.’

  ‘Miss Dawkins is an ass,’ said her husband.

  ‘It is a pity she has no one to look after her,’ said Mrs Damer.

  M. de la Bordeau was still listening to Miss Dawkins’s raptures about Mount Sinai. ‘I wonder whether she has got any money,’ said M. de la Bordeau to himself. ‘It can’t be much,’ he went on thinking, ‘or she would not be left in this way by herself.’ And the result of his thoughts was that Miss Dawkins, if undertaken, might probably become more plague than profit. As to Miss Dawkins herself, though she was ecstatic about Mount Sinai – which was not present – she seemed to have forgotten the poor Pyramids, which were then before her nose.

  The two lads were riding races along the dusty path, much to the disgust of their donkey-boys. Their time for enjoyment was to come. There were hampers to be opened; and then the absolute climbing of the Pyramids would actually be a delight to them.

  As for Miss Damer and Mr Ingram, it was clear that they had forgotten palm-trees, Pyramids, the Nile, and all Egypt. They had escaped to a much fairer paradise.

  ‘Could I bear to live among Republicans?’ said Fanny, repeating the last words of her American lover, and looking down from her donkey to the ground as she did so. ‘I hardly know what Republicans are, Mr Ingram.’