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XXVI.

THE CATARACT.

THE Ibis went up the cataract.

In that pleasant, spacious dining-room of Shepherd's, at Cairo, after billiard-exhilaration of a pleasant morning, men ask each other, over a quiet tiffin, "you went up the cataract?" as if boats leaped cataracts as lovers scale silken ladders to their ladies.

The Ibis, however, went up the cataract. Imaginative youth will needs picture the Ibis dashing dexterously up a Nile Niagara, nor deem that in mystic Egypt is any thing impossible. Nor can that imagination picture scenes more exciting. Only now let us more sedately sail; for stranger scenery than this, no man sees in long voyaging.

Early on the morrow of the treaty, a mad rabble took possession of the Ibis. They came tumbling and pitching in, wild, and wan, and grotesque, as the eager ghosts that file into Charon's barque when it touches the Stygian shore. The captain of cap

tains had gone round by land to meet us at a certain point in the rapid, but had sent a substitute to pilot our way until we met him. The new rabble ran around the deck tumbling over each other, shouting, chattering, staring at the Hadji Hamed's kitchen arrangements, and the peculiarities of the Howadji-and the whole devil's row was excited and stirred up constantly by a sagacious superintendent with a long kurbash, who touched the refractory where cherubs are intangible, taking good care that the row should be constantly more riotous, and nothing effected but his abundant castigation. Our own crew were superfluous for the nonce, and lay around the deck useless as the Howadji. A bright sun shone—a fair breeze blew, and we slipped quietly away from the shore of Syene.

The Ibis rounded a rock, and all greenness and placid palm beauty vanished. We were on the outskirts of the seething struggle between the two powers. Narrow, and swift, and dark, and still, like a king flying from a terrible triumph, flowed our royal river. Huge hills of jagged rock impended. Boulders lay in the water. White sand shored the stream, stretching sometimes among the rocks in short sweeps, whose dazzling white contrasted intensely with the black barriers of rock. High on a rocky peak glared a shekh's white tomb, the death's

head in that feast of terrible fascination and delight, and smoothly sheering precipices below, gave hope no ledge to grasp in falling, but let it slip and slide inevitably into the black gulf beneath. The wreck of a dahabieh lay high-lifted upon the rocks in the water, against the base of the cliff, its sycamore ribs white rotting, like skeletons hung for horror and warning around the entrance of Castle Despair. All about us was rock ponderously piled, and the few sand strips. Every instant the combinations changed, so narrow was the channel, and every moment the scenery was more savage.

The wind blew us well, and the sharp quick eye of the pilot minded well our course. Sometimes we swept by rocks nearly enough to touch them. Sometimes the doubtful Ibis seemed inevitably driving into a cliff, but bent away as she approached, and ran along the dark, solemn surface of the river. Three miles of such sailing, then the cataract.

It is a series of rocky rapids. There is no fall of water, only a foaming, currenty slope, as in all rapids. The cataract is the shock of the struggle between the desert and the river. The crisis announced long since by the threatening sand-heights, has arrived. Through your dreamy avenue of palmtwilight, and silence, you have advanced to no lotus

isles, but to a fierce and resounding battle-that sense of fate announced it in the still sunniness of the first mornings. But it seemed then only shadowy, even seductive in awfulness, like death to young imaginations. At Syene, this sunny morning, it has become a stirring reality. Pressing in from Lybia and Arabia, the intervening greenness the insatiate overwhelmed, rocks and sands here grasp the shoulders of the river, and hurl their shattered crags into its bosom.

Bleak, irregular mounds and hills, and regularly layered rock, rise, and slope, and threaten, all around. Down the steep sides of the mountains, here reaching the river, like a headlong plunge of disordered cavalry, roll fragments of stone of every size and shape. Like serried fronts, immovable, breasting the burden of the battle, the black smooth precipices stand in the rushing stream. Then pile upon pile, fantastic, picturesque, strange, but never sublime, like foes lifted upon foes to behold the combat, the intricate forms of rock crowd along the shore.

It is the desert's enthusiastic descent-its frenzied charge of death or victory. Confusion confounded, desolated desolation, never sublime, yet always solemn, with a sense of fate in the swift-rushing waters, that creates a sombre interest, not all unhuman, but akin to dramatic intensity.

The Nile, long dallying in placid Nubia, lingers lovingly around templed Phila-the very verge of the vortex. It laves the lithe flowers along its shore, and folds it in a beautiful embrace. It sees what it saw there, but what it sees no longer. Is its calm the trance of memory, or of love? What were the Ptolemies, and their temples, and their lives what those of all their predecessors there— but various expressions, sweet and strange, that flushed along the face of the Nile's idol, but fleetly faded? It lingers on the very verge of the vortex, then, unpausing, plunges in. Foamingly furious, it dashes against the sharp rocks, and darts beyond them. Scornfully sweeping, it seethes over ambuscades of jagged stone below. Through tortuous channels here, through wild ways there, it leads its lithe legion undismayed, and the demon desert is foiled forever.

Then royally raging, a king with dark brows thoughtful, the Nile sweeps solemnly away from the terrible triumph; but caresses palm-belted Syene as it flies, and calms itself gradually beyond, among serene green shores.

The Ibis reached the first rapid. The swift rush of the river, and the favoring wind, held it a long time stationary. Had the wind lulled, she would have swung round suddenly with the stream, and

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