The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 05, No. 30, April, 1860

I dropped the curtains of the bed, drew those of the window more closely, to exclude the shrill winter wind that was blowing the slant sleet against the clattering window-panes, broke up the lump of cannel coal in the grate into a bright blaze that subsided into a warm, steady glow of heat and light, drew an arm-chair and a little table up to the cheerful fire, and sat down to read the manuscript which the quiet man behind the curtains had given me. Why shouldn't I (I was his physician) make myself as comfortable as was possible at two o'clock of a stormy winter night, in a house that contained but two persons beside my German patient,—a half-stupid serving-man, doubtless already asleep down-stairs, and myself? This is what I read that night, with the comfortable fire on one side, and Death, holding strange colloquy with the fitful, screaming, moaning wind, on the other.

As I wish simply to relate what has happened to me, (thus the manuscript began,) what I attempted, in what I sinned, and how I failed, I deem no introduction or genealogies necessary to the first part of my life. I was an only child of parents who were passionately fond of me,—the more, perhaps, because an accident that had happened to me in my childhood rendered me for some years a partial invalid. One day, (I was about five years old then,) a gentleman paid a visit to my father, riding a splendid Arabian horse. Upon dismounting, he tied the horse near the steps of the piazza instead of the horseblock, so that I found I was just upon the level with the stirrup, standing at a certain elevation. Half as an experiment, to try whether I could touch the horse without his starting, I managed to get my foot into the stirrup, and so mounted upon his back. The horse, feeling the light burden, did start, broke from his fastening, and sped away with me on his back at the top of his speed. He ran several miles without stopping, and finished by pitching me off his back upon the ground, in leaping a fence. This fall produced some disease of the spine, which clung to me till I was twelve years old, when it was almost miraculously cured by an itinerant Arab physician. He was generally pronounced to be a quack, but he certainly effected many wonderful cures, mine among others.

I had always been an imaginative child; and my long-continued sedentary life compelling me (a welcome compulsion) to reading as my chief occupation and amusement, I acquired much knowledge beyond my years.

My reading generally had one peculiar tone: a certain kind of mystery was an essential ingredient in the fascination that books which I considered interesting had for me. My earliest fairy tales were not those unexciting stories in which the good genius appears at the beginning of the book, endowing the hero with such an invincible talisman that suspense is banished from the reader's mind, too well enabled to foresee the triumph at the end; but stories of long, painful quests after hidden treasure,—mysterious enchantments thrown around certain persons by witch or wizard, drawing the subject in charmed circles nearer and nearer to his royal or ruinous destiny,—strange spells cast upon bewitched houses or places, that could be removed only by the one hand appointed by Fate. So I pored over the misty legends of the San Grail, and the sweet story of "The Sleeping Beauty," as my first literature; and as the rough years of practical boyhood trooped up to elbow my dreaming childhood out of existence, I fed the same hunger for the hidden and mysterious with Detective-Police stories, Captain Kidd's voyages, and wild tales of wrecks on the Spanish Main, of those vessels of fabulous wealth that strewed the deep sea's lap with gems (so the stories ran) of lustre almost rare enough to light the paths to their secret hiding-places.

But in the last year of my captivity as an invalid a new pleasure fell into my hands. I discovered my first book of travels in my father's library, and as with a magical key unlocked the gate of an enchanted realm of wondrous and ceaseless beauty. It was Sir John Mandeville who introduced me to this field of exhaustless delight; not a very trustworthy guide, it must be confessed,—but my knowledge at that time was too limited to check the boundless faith I reposed in his narrative. It was such an astonishment to discover that men, black-coated and black-trousered men, such as I saw in crowds every day in the street from my sofa-corner, (we had moved to the city shortly after my accident,) had actually broken away from that steady stream of people, and had traversed countries as wild and unknown as the lands in the Nibelungen Lied, that my respect for the race rose amazingly. I scanned eagerly the sleek, complacent faces of the portly burghers, or those of the threadbare schoolmasters, thinned like carving-knives by perpetual sharpening on the steel of Latin syntax, in search of men who could have dared the ghastly terrors of the North with Ross or Parry, or the scorching jungles of the Equator with Burckhardt and Park. Cut off for so long a time from actual contact with the outside world, I could better imagine the brooding stillness of the Great Desert, I could more easily picture the weird ice-palaces of the Pole, waiting, waiting forever in awful state, like the deserted halls of the Walhalla for their slain gods to return, than many of the common street-scenes in my own city, which I had only vaguely heard mentioned.

I followed the footsteps of the Great Seekers over the wastes, the untrodden paths of the world; I tracked Columbus across the pathless Atlantic,—heard, with Balboa, the "wave of the loud-roaring ocean break upon the long shore, and the vast sea of the Pacific forever crash on the beach,"—gazed with Cortés on the temples of the Sun in the startling Mexican empire,—or wandered with Pizarro through the silver-lined palaces of Peru. But a secret affection drew me to the mysterious regions of the East and South,—towards Arabia, the wild Ishmael bequeathing sworded Korans and subtile Aristotles as legacies to the sons of the freed-woman,—to solemn Egypt, riddle of nations, the vast, silent, impenetrable mystery of the world. By continual pondering over the footsteps of the Seekers, the Sought-for seemed to grow to vast proportions, and the Found to shrink to inappreciable littleness. For me, over the dreary ice-plains of the Poles, over the profound bosom of Africa, the far-stretching steppes of Asia, and the rocky wilds of America, a great silence brooded, and in the unexplored void faint footfalls could be heard here and there, threading their way in the darkness. But while the longing to plunge, myself, into these dim regions of expectation grew more intense each day, the prison-chains that had always bound me still kept their habitual hold upon me, even after my recovery. I dreamt not of making even the vaguest plans for undertaking explorations myself. So I read and dreamt, filling my room with wild African or monotonous Egyptian scenery, until I was almost weaned from ordinary Occidental life.

I passed four blissful years In this happy dream-life, and then it was abruptly brought to an end by the death of my father and mother almost simultaneously by an epidemic fever prevailing in the neighborhood. I was away from home at a bachelor uncle's at the time, and so was unexpectedly thrown on his hands, an orphan, penniless, except in the possession of the small house my father had owned in the country before our removal to the city, and to be provided for.

My uncle placed me in a mercantile house to learn business, and, after exercising some slight supervision over me a few months, left me entirely to my own resources. As, however, he had previously taken care that these resources should be sufficient, I got along very well upon them, was regularly promoted, and in the space of six years, at the age of twenty-one, was in a rather responsible situation in the house, with a good salary. But my whole attention could not be absorbed in the dull routine of business, my most precious hours were devoted to reading, in which I still pursued my old childish track of speculation, with the difference that I exchanged Sinbad's valley of diamonds for Arabia Petraea, Sir John Mandeville for Herodotus, and Robinson Crusoe for Belzoni and Burckhardt Whether my interest in these Oriental studies arose from the fact of the house being concerned in the importation of the products of the Indies, or whether from the secret attraction that had drawn me Eastward since my earliest childhood, as if the Arab doctor had bewitched in curing me, I cannot say; probably it was the former, especially as the India business became gradually more and more intrusted to my hands.

Shortly after my twenty-first birthday, I received a note from my uncle, from whom I had not heard for a year, or two, informing me that my father's house, which he had kept rented for me during the first years of my minority, had been without a tenant for a year, and, as I had now come of age, I had better go down to D– and take possession of it. This letter, touching upon a long train of associations and recollections, awoke an intense longing in me to revisit the home of my childhood, and meet those phantom shapes that had woven that spell in those dreaming years, which I sometimes thought I felt even now. So I obtained a short leave of absence, and started the next morning in the coach for D–.

It was what is called a "raw morning," for what reason I know not, for such days are really elaborated with the most exquisite finish. A soft gray mist hugged the country in a chilly embrace, while a fine rain fell as noiselessly as snow, upon soaked ground, drenched trees, and peevish houses. There is always a sense of wonder about a mist. The outlines of what we consider our hardest tangibilities are melted away by it into the airiest dream-sketches, our most positive and glaring facts are blankly blotted out, and a fresh, clean sheet left for some new fantasy to be written upon it, as groundless as the rest; our solid land dissolves in cloud, and cloud assumes the stability of land. For, after all, the only really tangible thing we possess is man's Will; and let the presence and action of that be withdrawn but for a few moments, and that mysterious Something which we vainly endeavor to push off into the Void by our pompous nothings of brick and plaster and stone closes down upon us with the descending sky, writing Delendum on all behind us, Unknown on all before. At that time, the only actual Now, that stands between these two infinite blanks, becomes identical with the mind itself, independent of accidents of situation or circumstance; and the mind thus becoming boldly prominent, amidst the fading away of physical things, stamps its own character upon its shadowy surroundings, moulding the supple universe to the shape of its emotions and feelings.

I was the only inside passenger, and there was nothing to check the entire surrender of my mind to all ghostly influence. So I lay stretched upon the cushions, staring blankly into the dense gray fog closing up all trace of our travelled road, or watching the light edges of the trailing mist curl coyly around the roofs of houses and then settle grimly all over them, the fantastic shapes of trees or carts distorted and magnified through the mist, the lofty outlines of some darker cloud stalking solemnly here and there, like enormous dumb overseers faithfully superintending the work of annihilation. The monotonous patter of the rain-drops upon the wet pavement or muddy roads, blending with the low whining of the wind and the steady rumble of the coach-wheels, seemed to make a kind of witch-chant, that wove with braided sound a weird spell about me, a charm fating me for some service, I knew not what. That chant moaned, it wailed, it whispered, it sang gloriously, it bound, it drowned me, it lapped me in an inextricable stream of misty murmuring, till I was perplexed, bewildered, enchanted. I felt surprised at myself, when, at the end of the day's journey, I carried my bag to the hotel, and ate my supper there as usual,—and felt natural again only when, having obtained the key of my house, I sallied forth in the dim twilight to make it my promised visit.

I found the place, as I had expected, in a state of utter desolation. A year's silence had removed it so far from the noisy stream of life that flowed by it, that I felt, as I pushed at the rusty door-lock, as if I were passing into some old garret of Time, where he had thrown forgotten rubbish too worn-out and antiquated for present use. A strong scent of musk greeted me at my entrance, which I found came from a box of it that had been broken upon the hall-floor. I had stowed it away (it was a favorite perfume with me, because it was so associated with my Arabian Nights' stories) upon a ledge over the door, where it had rested undisturbed while the house was tenanted, and had been now probably dislodged by rats. But I half fancied that this odor which impregnated the air of the whole house was the essence of that atmosphere in which, as a child, I had communicated with Burckhardt and Belzoni,—and that, expelled by the solid, practical, Occidental atmosphere of the last few years, it had flowed back again, in these last silent months, in anticipation of my return.

Like a prudent householder, I made the tour of the house with a light I had provided myself with, and mentally made memoranda of repairs, alterations, etc., for rendering it habitable. My last visit was to be to the garret, where many of my books yet remained. As I passed once more through the parlor, on my way thither, a ray of light from my raised lamp fell upon the wall that I had thought blank, and a majestic face started suddenly from the darkness. So sudden was the apparition, that for the moment I was startled, till I remembered that there had formerly been a picture in that place, and I stopped to examine it. It was a head of the Sphinx. The calm, grand face was partially averted, so that the sorrowful eyes, almost betraying the aching secret which the still lips kept sacred, were hidden,—only the slight, tender droop in the corner of the mouth told what their expression might be. Around, forever stretched the endless sands,—the mystery of life found in the heart of death. That mournful, eternal face gave me a strange feeling of weariness and helplessness. I felt as if I had already pressed eagerly to the other side of the head, still only to find the voiceless lips and mute eyes. Strange tears sprang to my eyes; I hastily brushed them away, and, leaving the Sphinx, mounted to my garret.

But the riddle followed me. I sat down on the floor, beside a box of books, and somewhat listlessly began pulling it over to examine the contents. The first book I took hold of was a little worn volume of Herodotus that had belonged to my father. I opened it; and as if it, too, were a link in the chain of influences which I half felt was being forged around me, it opened at the first part of "Euterpe," where Herodotus is speculating upon the phenomena of the Nile. Twenty-two hundred years,—I thought,—and we are still wondering, the Sphinx is still silent, and we yet in the darkness! Alas, if this riddle be insoluble, how can we hope to find the clue to deeper problems? If there are places on our little earth whither our feet cannot go, curtains that our hands cannot withdraw, how can we expect to track paths through realms of thought,—how to voyage in those airy, impalpable regions whose existence we are sure of only while we are there voyaging?

"Nilus in extremum fugit perterritus orbem Occuluitque caput, quod adhuc latet."

Lost through reckless presumption, might not earnest humility recover that mysterious lurking-place? Might not one, by devoted toil, by utter self-sacrifice, with eyes purified by long searching from worldly and selfish pollution,—might not such a one tear away the veil of centuries, and, even though dying in the attempt, gain one look into this arcanum? Might not I?—The unutterable thought thrilled me and left me speechless, even in thinking. I strained my forehead against the darkness, as if I could grind the secret from the void air. Then I experienced the following mental sensation,—which, being purely mental, I cannot describe precisely as it was, but will translate it as nearly as possible into the language of physical phenomena.

It was as if my mind—or, rather, whatever that passive substratum is that underlies our volition and more truly represents ourselves—were a still lake, lying quiet and indifferent. Presently the sense of some coming Presence sent a breathing ripple over its waters; and immediately afterward it felt a sweep as of trailing garments, and two arms were thrown around it, and it was pressed against a "life-giving bosom," whose vivifying warmth interpenetrating the whole body of the lake, its waters rose, moved by a mighty influence, in the direction of that retreating Presence; and again, though nothing was seen, I felt surely whither was that direction. It was NILEWARD. I knew, with the absolute certainty of intuition, that henceforth I was one of the kletoi, the chosen,—selected from thousands of ages, millions of people, for this one destiny. Henceforth a sharp dividing-line cut me off from all others: their appointment was to trade, navigate, eat and drink, marry and give in marriage, and the rest; mine was to discover the Source of the Nile. Hither had all the threads of my life been converging for many years; they had now reached their focus, and henceforth their course was fixed.

I was scarcely surprised the next day at receiving a letter from my employers appointing me to a situation as supercargo of a merchant-vessel bound on a three-years' voyage to America and China,—in returning thence, to sail up the Mediterranean, and stop at Alexandria. I immediately wrote an acceptance, and then busied myself about obtaining a three-years' tenant for my house. As the house was desirable and well-situated, this business was soon arranged; and then, as I had nothing further to do in the village, I left it for the last time, as it proved, and returned to the city,—whence, after a fortnight of preparation, I set sail on my eventful enterprise. Although our voyage was filled with incident that in another place would be interesting enough to relate, yet here I must omit all mention of it, and, passing over three years, resume my narrative at Alexandria, where I left the vessel, and finally broke away from mercantile life.

From Alexandria I travelled to Cairo, where I intended to hire a servant and a boat, for I wished to try the water-passage in preference to the land. The cheapness of labor and food rendered it no difficult matter to obtain my boat and provision it for a long voyage,—for how long I did not tell the Egyptian servant whom I hired to attend me. A certain feeling of fatality caused me to make no attempt at disguise, although disguise was then much more necessary than it has been since: I openly avowed my purpose of travelling on the Nile for pleasure, as a private European. My accoutrements were simple and few. Arms, of course, I carried, and the actual necessaries for subsistence; but I entirely forgot to prepare for sketching, scientific surveys, etc. My whole mind was possessed with one idea: to see, to discover;—plans for turning my discoveries to account were totally foreign to my thoughts.

So, on the 6th of November, 1824, we set sail. I had been waiting three years to arrive at this starting-point,—my whole life, indeed, had been dumbly turning towards it,—yet now I commenced it with a coolness and tranquillity far exceeding that I had possessed on many comparatively trifling occasions. It is often so. We are borne along on the current like drift-wood, and, spying jutting rocks or tremendous cataracts ahead, fancy, "Here we shall be stranded, there buoyed up, there dashed in pieces over those falls,"—but, for all that, we glide over those threatened catastrophes in a very commonplace manner, and are aware of what we have been passing only upon looking back at them. So no one sees the great light shining from Heaven,—for the people are blear-eyed, and Saul is blinded. But as I left Cairo in the greatening distance, floating onward to the heart of the mysterious river, I floated also into the twin current of thought, that, flowing full and impetuous from the shores of the peopled Mediterranean, follows the silent river, and tracks it to its hidden lurking-place in the blank desert. Onward, past the breathless sands of the Libyan Desert, past the hundred-gated Thebes, past the stone guardians of Abou-Simbel, waiting in majestic patience for their spell of silence to be broken,—onward. It struck me curiously to come to the cataract, and be obliged to leave my boat at the foot of the first fall, and hire another above the second,—a forcible reminder that I was travelling backwards, from the circumference to the centre from which that circumference had been produced, faintly feeling my way along a tide of phenomena to the noumenon supporting them. So we always progress: from arithmetic to geometry, from observation to science, from practice to theory, and play with edged tools long before we know what knives mean. For, like Hop-o'-my-Thumb and his brothers, we are driven out early in the morning to the edge of the forest, and are obliged to grope our way back to the little house whence we come, by the crumbs dropped on the road. Alack! how often the birds have eaten our bread, and we are captured by the giant lying in wait!

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.