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Updated: September 25, 2025
In another chapter I will tell you more about the monuments; at present I wish to describe the Nile as it appears to-day. Our first view of the river is obtained as we cross the Kasr-en-Nil bridge at Cairo to join one of the many steamers by which visitors make the Nile trip, and one's first impression is one of great beauty, especially in the early morning.
My first visit after my return was to Sacramento, a city of about forty thousand inhabitants, more than a hundred miles inland from San Francisco, on the Sacramento, where was the capital of the State, and where were fleets of river steamers, and a large inland commerce. Here I saw the inauguration of a Governor, Mr.
He thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert places, the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded and the big steamers came splashing by, and one had reached the sea the limitless sea, with its thousand islands, its thousands of islands, and its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant journeyings round and about that greater world.
A whole week had been consumed by the tedious trip when they drove into the busy and bustling town of Leavenworth, one bright autumnal morning. All along the way they had picked up much information about the movement of steamers, and they were delighted to find that the steamboat "New Lucy" was lying at the levee, ready to sail on the afternoon of the very day they would be in Leavenworth.
Sometimes I would see far stretches of mountain peaks, and sometimes the crowded streets of cities; but for the most part my visions were of the sea tall ships sailing, and little boats drifting over calm water in moonlight, and black steamers gliding quickly past me; and still more frequently, but always in a calm sea, the broken hulks of wrecked ships with shattered masts and tangled rigging and with dead men lying about their decks, and sometimes with a dead man hanging across the wheel and moving a little with the hulk's motion so that in a horrible sort of way he seemed to be half alive.
The one sees projected on the outer world his own imaginings, now fair, now gloomy; while the other sees in the world, land to be cut up into corner-lots for speculation, and water for sawmills and cotton-mills, and to float clipper-ships and steamers. The one is this-worldly; the other is other-worldly.
Two steamers touch here weekly, and there is a daily mail and telegraphic communication with the outside world. A few tourists, mostly from Montreal and Quebec, fill two or three small boarding-houses. The next morning we started in wagons for Matapedia, thirty miles up the river, where we expected to secure canoes and Indians for our trip to the upper waters of the Restigouche.
I have seen even old men deeply absorbed in the examination of each other's watches, with a view to their exchange. Tired, wearied, and thirsty, they continued their walk up the street until they came into the motley stream of people who were wending their way down to the piers, where the steamers were constantly coming in and going out with passengers from and to the islands.
"And we shall pass ever so many towns and cities, and the river will be full of steamers and flat-boats," I continued, as the raft glided round the bend into the great river. "Now we are in the Wisconsin, Flora; and this is Riverport on the right of us." "We can't see much of it." "No; but you will find enough in the daytime to amuse you. I hope you will sleep all night after this."
It's a filthy little Slav town with only one street, which stinks, and in which one can't walk after rain without goloshes. There is a calm bay there full of steamers and boats with coloured sails.
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