From sketch-book and diary. Elizabeth ButlerЧитать онлайн книгу.
encouragement, very gracefully fell on their necks and gave them a drink of water each in turn. All this went on in a faint light from the hanging lamps, and the heat became suffocating. Mrs. C. put her hand on my shoulder, and pointing upwards asked me, “What is that?” A little white figure had appeared on a ledge high up under the drum of the dome. Whether man, woman, monkey, or goblin, I never saw a more impish figure, and it squatted there looking down from under its hood. I saw many very queer beings in Egypt as time went on, and decidedly the British occupation has not exorcised all the old magic of the Egyptians. But I have never played with it as some do. Not from fear, but from dislike. I am told in sober truth, people who came to scoff have begged to be let go when spell-bound with horror at what they have seen in a drop of enchanted ink spilled on a table.
We have sometimes played tricks on those people with imitation magic, but never more successfully than did our friend Sir James Dormer out in the Great Desert, when he struck the Bedouins dumb by taking out his glass eye, which they, of course, believed to be his own, tossing it in the air, and replacing it. He had great power over them, I should say, for ever after. Brave man, he was killed shortly after in India by the wild animal he had wounded and who sprang on him on his blind side. I think a man with a single eye is doubly brave who goes out tiger-shooting in the jungle.
A much wholesomer diversion than the Dervishes was provided by the then General in command at Cairo a few days later, when some three hundred of the Native Camel Corps were put through a series of splendid manœuvres out in the great open spaces of Abassieh, beyond the Tombs of the Mameluks. I got out of the carriage when warned that the final charge was about to be delivered, and stood so as to see them coming nearly “stem on.” It was a sight worth seeing, and surprising to me, who, before I landed, had never seen a camel worthy of the name. When the “halt!” was sounded, down fell the three hundred bellowing creatures on their knees in mid-career, close up to us, and the panting riders leapt off, their accoutrements in most admired disorder, and their puttees for the most part streaming along the ground. I was in a hurry to get back to Shepheard’s to take the impression down, for I was greatly struck by so novel a sight. The red morocco-leather saddle covers were most effective, and very sorry I was on my next visit to Egypt to find they had gone the way of all “effective” bits of military equipment, and were replaced by dull brown substitutes. Henceforth I was an enthusiastic admirer of that most picturesque of animals, and though I approached the camel at first with diffidence and apprehension, I soon found him much easier to draw than the horse. What you would like to do with a horse to give him movement and action, but mustn’t, you may do with a camel. You can twist his neck almost indefinitely and brandish his great coarse head as you like, and his long legs give you carte-blanche for producing speed. I found out a curious fact as time went on and I had dogged dozens of camels about the desert and made orderlies walk them up and down for me—namely, that the camel moves his legs in the walk precisely like the horse, but when he falls into a trot he moves the legs of the same side forward together. He walks like a horse and trots like a camel! As to the gallop, a more dislocating performance I never saw. Lady—— once told me she had, by an unlucky chance, got on a baggage camel with a hard mouth, or rather nose, and it ran away with her in the wide, wide desert. She hauled in the nose rope with the strength of despair, till the detestable animal’s face was twisted back taut into her lap and was looking at her, and still the body galloped forward without the remotest check. She artistically left the end of the adventure untold.
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