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Updated: May 6, 2025
She was staying at the Cataract Hotel at Assuan. He was so divided as to the wisdom of Michael's going or staying that his response had lacked his usual note of sincerity. "Then I'll go," Michael said, for into his mind had floated a vision of Margaret dressed in her ball-finery and dancing as Freddy's sister would dance dancing with other men. "Then that settles it," Freddy said.
After a river journey of 583 miles from Cairo, Assuan is reached limit of Egypt proper and the beginning of an entirely new phase of Nile scenery. Cultivation in any large sense has been left behind, and we are now in Nubia, a land of rock and sand, sparsely inhabited, and, excepting in very small patches along the water's edge, producing no crops.
About the place itself there was little of interest; it was a one-horse show with a few Arabs, Bedouins and Sudanese, many flea-bitten mongrels and clouds of flies. But this island-studded expanse of water was the great Assuan Dam.
And right through the middle of it hooting and kicking up the Nile passed a Cook's steamer all ready to take tourists to Assuan. From the Nubian's point of view she, and not himself, was the wonder as great as the Swiss-controlled, Swiss-staffed hotel behind her, whose lift, maybe, the Nubian helped to run.
And always the Loulia seems to be drifting, so quietly she slips up, or down, the level waterway. And one drifts, too; one can but drift, happily, sleepily, forgetting every care. From Abydos to Denderah one drifts, and from Denderah to Karnak, to Luxor, to all the marvels on the western shore; and on to Edfu, to Kom Ombos, to Assuan, and perhaps even into Nubia, to Abu-Simbel, and to Wadi-Halfa.
The reservists obeyed the summons to the colours of their own free will and with gratifying promptness, instead of being tardily dragged from their homes in chains as in the days of Ismail. All the battalions of the army were brought up to war strength. Two new battalions of reservists were formed, the 15th and 16th. The 15th was placed at Assuan and Korosko on the line of communications.
He begged that a few might be sent to Assuan. None were sent. He proposed to visit the Mahdi himself and try to arrange matters with him personally. Perhaps he recognised a kindred spirit. The Government in this case very naturally forbade him. At last the quarrel is open. He makes no effort to conceal his disgust. Such are the chief features in the wretched business.
I can't say whether she considered him an answer to her prayer, or a denial of it. Anyhow, there he was; better, perhaps, than nobody, until she learned from his own lips tactless though ardent lips that he had come from Cairo to Assuan, from Assuan to Philae, to see her. Then she took alarm, and remarked in the old, conventional way of women, that they'd "better go look for the others."
A luscious fruit salad looked cool and tempting in a glass bowl, while iced drinks, which had been carried in ingenious Eastern water-coolers, appealed to his parched lips. The galantine of chicken and the selection of hors d'oeuvre would not have disgraced the table of the Cataract Hotel at Assuan. Here, indeed, were the flesh-pots of Egypt la tentation de Saint Antoine.
No land, however, could look more romantic than Assuan, City of the Cataracts, Greek Syene, that granite quarry whose red syenite made obelisks and sarcophagi for kings of countless dynasties.
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