Village Life in Egypt (Volume 2); With Sketches of the Said (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. People of Essouan ? Welees?Tradition adapted to Circumstances? An unlucky Practical Preacher ? Peculiar Race of People ? Ancient Egyptian Language ? Origin of our Crew?Characters of the Men ? Goomma, our Jack-of-all-Work ? Reis Suleiman ? Nile Etiquette ? Charm against the Evil Eye ? The Steersman; his peculiar Knowledge ? Mustering of the Crew ? Rationale of the Down-voyage ? Storms on the Nile ? Start?Akabah and Koubanieh ? Koom Ombos? View of the Ruins by Night?Lights on the Plain ? The Silk-tree ?Its Medicinal Value ? Amazons of Gebel Molair. The people of Essouan, as I have said, are different in appearance both from the peasantry of the neighborhood and from ordinary fellahs. They claim to be descended from a colony of soldiers, planted there ' in ancient times and seasons past;' and are somewhat remarkable for bigotry and superstition. The tombs of their deserted cemetery they regard not as those of mere ordinary mortals, but as belonging to Welees and holy men of all kinds, buried, as a lad told us, some hundred thousand years ago, ? indeed, before the time of Mohammed Ali! Many of them say that all the saints of Egypt have a commemorative headstone here. However this may be, it seems certain that the innumerable tablets, covered wim Cufic characters, that meet the eye in every direction, are invested with supernatural power; and every now and then an old tradition is revived in a new form, to the effect that adare-devil Turk, a drunken Arnaout, or an infidel Frank, has been punished for firing at them by instant death, or at least by the fracture of a limb. It seems certain that some foolish traveller, not many seasons ago, took a shot at one of these holy monuments, that his gun burst, and that his arm was broken. After such a confirmation of their be...