On we swept, leaving behind the burning rocks and dreary sands of Egypt and Lower Nubia, the green woods and thick acacias of Dongola, the distant pyramids of Mount Birkel, and the ruins of Meroë, just discovered footmarks of Ancient Ethiopia descending the Nile to bequeathe her glory and civilization to Egypt. At Old Dongola, my companion was very anxious that we should strike across the country to Shendy, to avoid the great curve of the Nile through Ethiopia. He found the sail somewhat tedious, as I could speak but little Egyptian, which I had picked up in scraps,he, no German or English. I managed to overrule his objections, however, as I could not bear to leave any part of the river unvisited; so we continued the water-route to the junction of the Blue and the White Nile, where I resolved to remain a week, before continuing my route. The inhabitants regarded us with some suspicion, but our inoffensive appearance so far conquered their fears that they were prevailed upon to give us some information about the country, and to furnish us with a fresh supply of rice, wheat, and dourra, in exchange for beads and bright-colored cloth, which I had brought with me for the purpose of such traffic, if it should be necessary. Bruce's discovery of the source of the Blue Nile, fifty years before, prevented the necessity of indecision in regard to my route, and so completely was I absorbed in the one object of my journey, that the magnificent scenery and ruins along the Blue Nile, which had so fascinated Cailliaud, presented few allurements for me.
My stay was rather longer than I had anticipated, as it was found necessary to make some repairs upon the boat, and, inwardly fretting at each hour's delay, I was eager to seize the first opportunity for starting again. On the 1st of March, I made a fresh beginning for the more unknown and probably more perilous portion of my voyage, having been about four months in ascending from Cairo. As my voyage had commenced about the abatement of the sickly season, I had experienced no inconvenience from the climate, and it was in good spirits that I resumed my journey. For several days we sailed with little eventful occurring,floating on under the cloudless sky, rippling a long white line through the widening surface of the ever-flowing river, through floating beds of glistening lotus-flowers, past undulating ramparts of foliage and winged ambak-blossoms guarding the shores scaled by adventurous vines that triumphantly waved their banners of white and purple and yellow from the summit, winding amid bowery islands studding the broad stream like gems, smoothly stemming the rolling flood of the river, flowing, ever flowing,lurking in the cool shade of the dense mimosa forests, gliding noiselessly past the trodden lairs of hippopotami and lions, slushing through the reeds swaying to and fro in the green water, still borne along against the silent current of the mysterious river, flowing, ever flowing.
We had now arrived at the land of the Dinkas, where the river, by broadening too much upon a low country, had become partially devoured by marsh and reeds, and our progress was very slow, tediously dragging over a sea of water and grass. I had become a little tired of my complete loneliness, and was almost longing for some collision with the tribes of savages that throng the shore, when the incident occurred that determined my whole future life. One morning, about seven o'clock, when the hot sun had already begun to rob the day of the delicious freshness lingering around the tropical night, we happened to be passing a tract of firmer land than we had met with for some time, and I directed the vessel towards the shore, to gather some of the brilliant lotus-flowers that fringed the banks. As we neared the land, I threw my gun, without which I never left the boat, on the bank, preparatory to leaping out, when I was startled by hearing a loud, cheery voice exclaim in English,"Hilloa! not so fast, if you please!"and first the head and then the sturdy shoulders of a white man raised themselves slowly from the low shrubbery by which they were surrounded. He looked at us for a minute or two, and nodded with a contented air that perplexed me exceedingly.
"So," he said, "you have come at last; I am tired of waiting for you"; and he began to collect his gun, knife, etc., which were lying on the ground beside him.
"And who are you," I returned, "who lie in wait for me? I think, Sir, you have the advantage."
Here the stranger interrupted me with a hearty laugh. "My dear fellow," he cried, "you are entirely mistaken. The technical advantage that you attribute to me is an error, as I do not have the honor of knowing your name, though you may know mine without further preface,Frederick Herndon; and the real advantage which I wish to avail myself of, a boat, is obviously on your side. The long and the short of it is," he added, (composedly extricating himself from the brushwood,) "that, travelling up in this direction for discovery and that sort of thing, you know, I heard at Sennaar that a white man with an Egyptian servant had just left the town, and were going in my direction in a boat. So I resolved to overtake them, and with their, or your, permission, join company. But they, or you, kept just in advance, and it was only by dint of a forced march in the night that I passed you. I learned at the last Dinka village that no such party had been yet seen, and concluded to await the your arrival here, where I pitched my tent a day and a night waiting for you. I am heartily glad to see you, I assure you."
With this explanation, the stranger made a spring, and leaped upon the yacht.
"Upon my word," said I, still bewildered by his sudden appearance, "you are very unceremonious."
"That," he rejoined, "is a way we Americans have. We cannot stop to palaver. What would become of our manifest destiny? But since you are so kind, I will call my Egyptian. Times are changed since we were bondsmen in Egypt, have they not? Ah, I forgot,you are not an American, and therefore cannot claim even our remote connection with the Ten Lost Tribes." Then raising his voice, "Here, Ibrahim!"
Again a face, but this time a swarthy one, emerged from behind a bush, and in answer to a few directions in his own dialect the man came down to the boat, threw in the tent and some other articles of traveller's furniture, and sprang in with the nonchalance of his master.
A little recovered from my first surprise, I seized the opportunity of a little delay in getting the boat adrift again to examine my new companion. He was standing carelessly upon the little deck of the vessel where he had first entered, and the strong morning light fell full upon his well-knit figure and apparently handsome face. The forehead was rather low, prominent above the eyebrows, and with keen, hollow temples, but deficient both in comprehensiveness and ideality. The hazel eyes were brilliant, but restless and shallow,the mouth of good size, but with few curves, and perhaps a little too close for so young a face. The well-cut nose and chin and clean fine outline of face, the self-reliant pose of the neck and confident set of the shoulders characterized him as decisive and energetic, while the pleasant and rather boyish smile that lighted up his face dispelled presently the peculiarly hard expression I had at first found in analyzing it. Whether it was the hard, shrewd light from which all the tender and delicate grace of the early morning had departed, I knew not; but it struck me that I could not find a particle of shade in his whole appearance. I seemed at once to take him in, as one sees the whole of a sunny country where there are no woods or mountains or valleys. And, in fact, I never did find any,never any cool recesses in his character; and as no sudden depths ever opened in his eyes, so nothing was ever left to be revealed in his character;like them, it could be sounded at once. That picture of him, standing there on my deck, with an indefinite expression of belonging to the place, as he would have belonged on his own hearth-rug at home, often recurred to me, again to be renewed and confirmed.
And thus carelessly was swept into my path, as a stray waif, that man who would in one little moment change my whole life! It is always so. Our life sweeps onward like a river, brushing in here a little sand, there a few rushes, till the accumulated drift-wood chokes the current, or some larger tree falling across it turns it into a new channel.
I had been so long unaccustomed to company that I found it quite a pleasant change to have some one to talk to; some one to sympathize with I neither wanted nor expected; I certainly did not find such a one in my new acquaintance. For the first two or three days I simply regarded him with the sort of wondering curiosity with which we examine a new natural phenomenon of any sort. His perfect self-possession and coolness, the nil-admirari and nil-agitari atmosphere which surrounded him, excited my admiration at first, till I discovered that it arose, not from the composure of a mind too deep-rooted to be swayed by external circumstances, but rather from a peculiar hardness and unimpressibility of temperament that kept him on the same level all the time. He had been born at a certain temperature, and still preserved it, from a sort of vis inertive of constitution. This impenetrability had the effect of a somewhat buoyant disposition, not because he could be buoyed on the tide of any strong emotion, but because few things could disturb or excite him. Unable to grasp the significance of anything outside of himself and his attributes, he took immense pride in stamping his character, his nationality, his practicality, upon every series of circumstances by which he was surrounded: he sailed up the Nile as if it were the Mississippi; although a well-enough-informed man, he practically ignored the importance of any city anterior to the Plymouth Settlement, or at least to London, which had the honor of sending colonists to New England; and he would have discussed American politics in the heart of Africa, had not my ignorance upon the topic generally excluded it from our conversation. He had what is most wrongly termed an exceedingly practical mind,that is, not one that appreciates the practical existence and value of thought as such, considering that a praxis, but a mind that denied the existence of a thought until it had become realized in visible action.
"'The end of a man is an action, and not a thought, though it be the noblest,' as Carlyle has well written," he triumphantly quoted to me, as, leaning over the little railing of the yacht, watching, at least I was, the smooth, green water gliding under the clean-cutting keel, we had been talking earnestly for some time. "A thought has value only as it is a potential action; if the action be abortive, the thought is as useless as a crank that fails to move an engine-wheel."
"Then, if action is the wheel, and thought only the crank, what does the body of your engine represent? For what purpose are your wheels turning? For the sake of merely moving?"
"No," said he, "moving to promote another action, and that another,andso on ad infinitum."
"Then you leave out of your scheme a real engine, with a journey to accomplish, and an end to arrive at; for so wheels would only move wheels, and there would be an endless chain of machinery, with no plan, no object for its existence. Does not the very necessity we feel of having a reason for the existence, the operation of anything, a large plan in which to gather up all ravelled threads of various objects, proclaim thought as the final end, the real thing, of which action, more especially human action, is but the inadequate visible expression? What kinds of action does Carlyle mean, that are to be the wheels for our obedient thoughts to set in motion? Hand, arm, leg, foot action? These are all our operative machinery. Does he mean that our 'noblest thought' is to be chained as a galley-slave to these, to give them means for working a channel through which motive power may be poured in upon them? Are we to think that our fingers and feet may move and so we live, or they to run for our thought, and we live to think?"
"Supposing we are," said Herndon, "what practical good results from knowing it? Action for action's sake, or for thinking's sake, is still action, and all that we have to look out for. What business have the brakemen at the wheels with the destiny of the train? Their business is simply to lock and unlock the wheels; so that their end is in the wheels, and not in the train."
"A somewhat dreary end," I said, half to myself. "The whole world, then, must content itself with spinning one blind action out of another; which means that we must continually alter or displace something, merely to be able to displace and alter something else."
"On the contrary, we exchange vague, speculative mystifications for definite, tangible fact. In America we have too much reality, too many iron and steam facts, to waste much time over mere thinking. That, Sir, does for a sleepy old country, begging your pardon, like yours; but for one that has the world's destiny in its hands,that is laying iron foot-paths from the Atlantic to the Pacific for future civilization to take an evening stroll along to see the sun set,that is converting black wool into white cotton, to clothe the inhabitants of Borrioboolagha,that is trading, farming, electing, governing, fighting, annexing, destroying, building, puffing, blowing, steaming, racing, as our young two-hundred-year-old is,we must work, we must act, and think afterwards. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might."
"And what," I said, "when hand-and-foot-action shall have ceased? will you then allow some play for thought-action?"
"We have no time to think of that," he returned, walking away, and thus stopping our conversation.
The man was consistent in his theory, at least. Having exalted physical motion (or action) to the place he did, he refused to see that the action he prized was more valuable through the thought it developed; consequently he reduced all actions to the same level, and prided himself upon stripping a deed of all its marvellousness or majesty. He did uncommon things in such a matter-of-fact way that he made them common by the performance. The faint spiritual double which I found lurking behind his steel and iron he either solidified with his metallic touch or pertinaciously denied its existence.
"Plato was a fool," he said, "to talk of an ideal table; for, supposing he could see it, and prove its existence, what good could it do? You can neither eat off it, nor iron on it, nor do anything else with it; so, for all practical purposes, a pine table serves perfectly well without hunting after the ideal. I want something that I can go up to, and know it is there by seeing and touching."
"But," said I, "does not that very susceptibility to bodily contact remove the table to an indefinite distance from you? If we can see and handle a thing, and yet not be able to hold that subtile property of generic existence, by which, one table being made, an infinite class is created, so real that tables may actually be modelled on it, and yet so indefinite that you cannot set your hand on any table or collection of tables and say, 'It is here,'if we can be absolutely conscious that we see the table, and yet have no idea how its image reflected on our retina can produce that absolute consciousness, does not the table grow dim and misty, and slip far away out of reach, of apprehension, much more of comprehension?"
"Stuff!" cried my companion. "If your metaphysics lead to proving that a board that I am touching with my hand is not there, I'll say, as I have already said, 'Throw (meta)physics to the dogs! I'll none of it!' A fine preparation for living in a material world, where we have to live in matter, by matter, and for matter, to wind one's self up in a snarl that puts matter out of reach, and leaves us with nothing to live in, or by, or for! Now you, for instance, are not content with this poor old Nile as it stands, but must go fussing and wondering and mystifying about it till you have positively nothing of a river left. I look at the water, the banks, the trees growing on them, the islands in which we get occasionally entangled: here, at least, I have a real, substantial river,not equal for navigation to the Ohio or Mississippi, but still very fair.Confound these flies!" he added, parenthetically, making a vigorous plunge at a dark cloud of the little pests that were closing down upon us.