The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

and nigger minstrels

from Central Africa, amused the holiday-hearted crowd. It was then that

the old people sat over draughts and dice-box in the cosy shade, while the

boys played at mora, or at pitch and toss, and the girls at a game of ball,

with forfeits for the one who missed a catch. It was then that the house-father bought new dolls for the children, and amulets or gold ear-rings or

necklaces of porcelain bugles for the wife. It was then that the market

stalls abounded with joints of beef and venison, and with geese hanging

down in long rows, and with chickens hatched by thousands under heaps

of dung. Salted quails, smoked fish, date sweetmeats, doura cakes, and

cheese; leeks, garlic cucumbers, and onions; lotus seeds mashed in milk,

roasted stalks of papyrus, jars of barley beer and palm wine, with many

other kinds of food, were sold in unusual plenty at that festive time.

 

It was then also that the white-robed priests, bearing the image of a god

and singing hymns, marched with solemn procession to the waterside,

and cast in a sacrifice of gold. For the water which had thus risen was

their life. Egypt is by nature a rainless desert which the Nile and the Nile

only, converts into a garden every year.

 

Far, far away in the distant regions of the south, in the deep heart of

Africa, lie two inland seas. These are the headwaters of the Nile; its

sources are in the sky. For the clouds, laden with waters collected out of

many seas, sail to the African equator, and there pour down a ten months’

rain. This ocean of falling water is received on a region sloping towards

the north, and is conveyed by a thousand channels to the vast rocky

cisterns which form the Speke and Baker Lakes.** They, filled and

bursting, cast forth the Nile, and drive it from them through a terrible and

thirsty land. The hot air lies on the stream and laps it as it flows. The

parched soil swallows it with open pores, but ton after ton of water is

supplied from the gigantic reservoirs behind, and so it is enabled to cross

that vast desert which spreads from the latitude of Lake Tchad to the

borders of the Mediterranean Sea.

 

The existence of the Nile is due to the Nyanza Lakes alone, but the

inundation of the river has a distinct and separate cause. In that

phenomenon the lakes are not concerned.

 

Between the Nile and the mouth of the Arabian Gulf are situated the

highlands of Abyssinia, rising many thousand feet above the level of the

sea, and intercepting the clouds of the Indian Ocean in their flight

towards the north. From these mountains, as soon as the rainy season has

set in, two great rivers come thundering down their dried-up beds, and

rush into the Nile. The main stream is now forced impetuously along; in

the Nubian desert its swelling waters are held in between walls of rock; as

soon as it reaches the low lying lands of Egypt it naturally overflows.

 

The Abyssinian tributaries do even more than this. The waters of the

 

[** Lakes Victoria and Albert]

White Nile are transparent and pure; but the Atbara and Blue Nile bring

down from their native land a black silt which the flood strews over the

whole valley as a kind of top-dressing or manure. On that rich and

unctuous mud, as soon as the waters have retired, the natives cast their

seed. Then their labours are completed; no changes of weather need

afterwards be feared; no anxious looks are turned towards the sky;

sunshine only is required to fulfil the crop, and in Egypt the sun is never

covered by a cloud.

 

Thus, were it not for the White Nile, the Abyssinian rivers would be

drunk up by the desert; and were it not for the Abyssinian rivers, the

White Nile would be a barren stream. The river is created by the rains of

the equator; the land by the tropical rains condensed in one spot by the

Abyssinian mountain pile.

 

In that fair Egyptian valley, fattened by a foreign soil, brightened by

eternal sunshine, watered by terrestrial rain, the natives were able to

obtain a year’s food in return for a few days’ toil, and so were provided

with that wealth of time which is essential for a nation’s growth.

 

A people can never rise from low estate as long as they are engrossed in

the painful struggle for daily bread. On the other hand, leisure alone is

not sufficient to effect the self-promotion of men. The savage of the

primeval forest burns down a few trees every year; his women raise an

easy crop from the ashes which mingle with the soil. He basks all day in

the sunshine, or prostrates himself in his canoe with his arms behind his

head and a fishing-line tied to his big toe. When the meat-hunger comes

upon him he takes up bow and arrow and goes for a few days into the

bush. His life is one long torpor, with spasms of activity. Century

follows century, but he does not change. Again, the shepherd tribes roam

from pasture to pasture; their flocks and herds yield them food and dress

and “houses of hair,” as they call their tents. They have little work to do;

their time is almost entirely their own. They pass long hours in slow

conversation, in gazing at the heavens, in the sensuous, passive oriental

reverie. The intellectual capacities of such men are by no means to be

despised, as those who have lived among them are aware. They are

skilful interpreters of nature’s language and of the human heart; they

compose beautiful poems; their religion is simple and sublime; yet time

passes on, and they do not advance. The Arab sheikh of the present day

lives precisely as Abraham did three thousand years ago; the Tartars of

Central Asia are the Scythians whom Herodotus described.

 

It is the first and indispensable condition of human progress that a people

shall be married to a single land; that they shall wander no more from one

region to another, but remain fixed and faithful to their soil. Then, if the

Earth-wife be fruitful, she will bear them children by hundreds and by

thousands; and then calamity will come and teach them by torture to

invent.

 

The Egyptians were islanders, cut off from the rest of the world by sand

and sea. They were rooted in their valley; they lived entirely upon its

fruits, and happily these fruits sometimes failed. Had they always been

able to obtain enough to eat, they would have remained always in the

semi-savage state.

 

It may appear strange that Egypt should have suffered from famine, for

there was no country in the ancient world where food was so abundant

and so cheap. Not only did the land produce enormous crops of corn; the

ditches and hollows which were filled by the overflowing Nile supplied a

harvest of wholesome and nourishing aquatic plants, and on the borders

of the desert thick groves of date-palms, which love a neutral soil,

embowered the villages, and formed live granaries of fruit.

 

But however plentiful food may be in any country, the population of that

country, as Malthus discovered, will outstrip it in the long run. If food is

unusually cheap, population will increase at an unusually rapid rate, and

there is not limit to its ratio of increase – no limit, that is to say, except

disease and death. On the other hand, there is a limit to the amount of

food that can be raised, for the basis of food is land, and land is a fixed

quantity. Unless some discovery is made by means of which provisions

may be manufactured with as much facility as children, the whole earth

will some day be placed in the same predicament as the island in which

we live, which has outgrown its food-producing power, and is preserved

from starvation only by means of foreign corn.

 

At the time we speak of, Egypt was irrigated by the Nile in a natural and

therefore imperfect manner. Certain tracts were overflooded; others were

left completely dry. The valley was filled with people to the brim. When

it was a good Nile, every ear of corn, every bunch of dates, every papyrus

stalk and lotus root was pre-engaged. There was no waste and no surplus

store. But sometimes a bad Nile came.

 

The bread of the people depended on the amount of inundation, and that

depended on the tropical rains, which vary more than is usually supposed.

If the rainfall in the Abyssinian highlands happened to be slight, the river

could not pay its full tribute of earth and water to the valley below; and if

the rainfall was unusually severe, houses were swept away, cattle were

drowned, and the water instead of returning at the usual time, became

stagnant on the fields. In either case famine and pestilence invariably

ensued. The plenty of ordinary years, like a baited trap, had produced a

luxuriance of human life, and the massacre was proportionally severe.

Encompassed by the wilderness, the unfortunate natives were unable to

escape. They died in heaps; the valley resembled a field of battle; each

village became a charnel-house; skeletons sat grinning at street corners,

and the winds clattered among dead men’s bones. A few survivors

lingered miserably through the year, browsing on the thorny shrubs of the

desert, and sharing with the vultures their horrible repast.

 

“God made all men equal” is a fine sounding phrase, and has also done

good service in its day, but it is not a scientific fact. On the contrary,

there is nothing so certain as the natural inequality of men. Those who

outlive hardships and sufferings which fall on all alike owe their

existence to some superiority, not only of body but of mind. It will easily

be conceived that among such superior-minded men there would be some

who, stimulated by the memory of that which was past and by the fear of

that which might return, would strain to the utmost their ingenuity to

control and guide the fickle river which had hitherto sported with their

lives.

 

We shall not attempt to trace out their inventions step by step. Humble in

its beginnings, slow in its improvements, the art or science of hydraulics

was finally mastered by the Egyptians. They devised a system of dikes,

reservoirs, and lock-canals, by means of which the excessive waters of a

violent Nile were turned from the fields and stored up to supply the wants

of a dry year. Thus also the precious fluid was conveyed to tracts of land

lying above the level of the river, and was distributed over the whole

valley with such precision that each lot or farm received a just and equal

share. Next, as the inundation destroyed all landmarks, surveying

became a necessary art in order to settle the disputes which broke out

every year. And, as the rising of the waters was more and more carefully

observed, it was found that its beginning coincided with certain aspects of

the stars. This led to the study of astronomy and the discovery of the

solar year. Agriculture became a mathematical art. It was ascertained

that so many feet of water would yield so many quarters of corn, and

thus, before a single seed was sown, they could count up the harvest as

correctly as if it had been already gathered in.

 

A natural consequence of all this was the separation of the inventor class,

who became at first the counsellors and afterwards the rulers of the

people. But while the men of mind were battling with the forces of

Nature, a contest of another kind was also going