# From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 1

FROM CAIRO TO THE SOUDAN FRONTIER
CHAPTER I
LIFE AT SEA
It is two hours since we picked our way between Scylla and Charybdis—no such mighty difficult feat to the navigators of to-day as it so strangely seems to have been to the sailors of the ancient world—and settled down for our two days further run to our Egyptian port. Reggio and Messina have long since disappeared; the spurs of Etna, which almost challenged comparison with their parent height as we were issuing from the Straits, have dwindled into knolls and hillocks, and for well-nigh an hour the great bare cone has stood out black and solitary against the deep orange of the western sky. Sicily itself has ​become one with its "mountain of old name;" there is nothing to be seen of the romantic island but its giant volcano, nothing left to recall any one of its clustering multitude of classic legends, save only the earliest and sternest of them all. The home of nymph and shepherd, of sacred fountain and love-sick river god, has vanished, and the everlasting prison of the buried Titan alone remains. But that grim donjon glooms at our departing vessel for long. It is still faintly visible when the pale lilac of the sky has melted into a still paler blue, when the flame-tipped purple of the sunset-wrack has become a lustreless brown, when the silver sheen of twilight has faded from the darkening waters. It is a race between the mists and the night to hide it first, and it would be hard to say which wins. Dusk or the sea-haze does at last hide it, leaving visible only the glimmering phantom of the Italian mainland, which itself, also, is soon swallowed up in the night. Then the moon glides, ​like, into her great throne-room of the heavens; the evening star calls up its slow and timid followers into the presence; the night-breeze begins to marshal her ermine-clad court of clouds; and then—why then the ineffable poetry of the hour and the scene is broken by the unspeakable prose of the dinner bell.
Life, as Carlyle observed at a moment when he was able to contemplate it undisturbed by dyspepsia, is a "conflux of two eternities." The sea and sky, when the last streak of land has disappeared, become a conflux of two virtual infinities. Life on the sea, therefore, being spent amid a combination of illimitables—at a representation of the Absolute, "supported," so to speak, "by the whole strength of the company"—one might well expect the spirit of man to be answerably affected by the solemnity of its surroundings. The correct thing for it to do, I believe, is "to beat against the bars of its fleshly prison," and to "long for absorption in the all-embracing Universe." Our muddy vesture of ​decay should grossly close us in no longer. A starry night on deck should speak to us more eloquently than it spoke to Lorenzo and Jessica on their moonlit bank, and the quiring of the spheres to the young-eyed cherubim should be audible above the wash of the flying waters, and perhaps even the throb of the engines.
As a matter of fact, however, there is no situation in which the spirit of man seems more eminently contented with its corporeal captivity than at this moment when it should be struggling for its freedom. The only result of these communings of his with the Infinite seems to be to magnify immensely his interest in the infinitesimal. Space, Time, Matter, and the Void, the One and the Many—all these vast and imposing abstractions appear to efface themselves in his imagination. As to Space, he is only conscious of it in its limitations while he is dressing. Time shrinks to an arbitrary though convenient method of computing the intervals between ​meals. Towards the close of each such period he becomes temporarily conscious of the Void; and in the perpetually recurring struggle with these repasts he may perhaps find a symbol of the eternal antithesis between the One and the Many, and of the eternal effort of the Many to merge itself in the One. The human mind, in short, instead of expanding in this transcendental company, contracts. Its emotions, at a moment when they might be expected to range the universe, assume their most egotistically personal shape; and when its intellectual and spiritual powers ought—in common decency, one might almost say—to predominate, its primitive, even its savage, instincts are supreme. Man, or, at any rate, average man, approaches as near to the condition of mechanism as, perhaps, it is possible for him to approach without actually becoming a machine. Human life is reduced to its purely animal processes, and the great facts and forces of Nature exist for the sole ​purpose of ministering to them. The sun rises that you may bask in its rays; the sea breeze blows for the disinterested encouragement of your appetite; the moon and stars are to look at while you smoke before "turning in." That the sea may lull and rock you to sleep is without doubt the final cause of its cradle-like movement, and the sufficient explanation of its soothing sound. You say to yourself as you sink to slumber that the ingenious Dr. Paley could not have anywhere found a more triumphant proof of his great doctrine of design in creation.
As to the spiritual, the intellectual, and even the moral regions of human life—well, at sea there are no such regions. They do not exist in human life. The talk about them which you remember to have heard on land, and to have believed in, had no solid basis in fact. It was a traveller's tale, the fable of some wonder-weaving explorer of the metaphysical ocean who has temporarily taken you in. You know better now. You know, for ​instance, that the so-called "Session of 1893" was a mere "railway-journey nightmare," the result of a too copious meal too hastily devoured at Newcastle. We had found that out, every one of us, ere we had been twenty-four hours on board. One lost soul there was among us, it is true, who muttered strange words, which sounded like "Parish Councils Bill;" but we others, the saved, gazed upon him with compassion and without comprehension, and anon he faded away. So, too, it fared with those who had brought with them broken sentences of the language of some dreamland in which men talk, it would seem, about Realism, and Impressionism, and other plainly imaginary things; but these sufferers also were easily curable. Their malady soon yielded to the humane treatment of neglect, and they ceased to regard their illusions as realities. For illusions, of course, they are. There are, in reality, no such things as politics, or economics, or art, or literature, or science, or philanthropy, or ​industry—particularly industry. There is no religion, except a vague form of Pantheism. There is no drama, save the one everlasting miracle play, which has the dawn for its Prologue, and morning, afternoon, evening, and night for its Acts. There are even no amusements—or none as the word and the thing are understood ashore. Sport and pastime no longer possess any traces of their terrene meaning. At sea there need not be, nor is there, any element in them which either promises excitement or pre-supposes skill. Otherwise, how could the most adventurous spirit derive full satisfaction, as it does, from bezique in the saloon, or the masculine intelligence find contentment in the imbecility of deck-quoits?
It is on the short voyage, the three, four, or five days' steam, as from one Mediterranean port to another, that these curious phenomena are most commonly to be remarked. The six or seven days' breathless run across the Atlantic in the "floating ​palace" is, of course, another matter. There you can hardly be said to leave the habits, or even the appliances, of your daily life on land behind you, and the "City man" almost expects to find his daily paper every morning on the breakfast-table, if not a Stock Exchange in the smoking saloon. And on any longer voyages it is well known that another process of demoralisation sets in. After anything more than "a week of it" at sea the contented frivolity of the traveller, the vacuous repose of mind in which he has hitherto been lapped, give way in most cases to a feeling of acute unrest. The infinite bores him as much as ever, but the finite, at any rate in its more innocent forms, has ceased to distract. He has read his novel; the mild recreations of the deck interest him no longer; the regularly recurring summons to the groaning, and possibly rolling, board has lost its power to awaken a responsive thrill in his breast. It is more than probable that he is bilious; it is tolerably certain that ​he is beginning to suffer from severe moral dyspepsia. In such a moment the traveller is thrown back, according to his or her sex, upon one or other of the two great—indeed, one may say the only two known—forms of relief from the irritating ennui of the sea voyage. He is driven to gambling, and she to quarrelling. Occasionally, it is true, the two pastimes are combined, or the former may lead by delightfully easy and natural stages to the latter. But, as a general rule, the two forms of distraction remain distinct in their character and incidents, although there is a certain superficial resemblance in their effects. Both of them exert a markedly centrifugal force. Gambling splits up the men into parties of four or more, according as they seek solace in whist or in "nap"; while quarrelling divides the women into smaller factions still. The process of disintegration, having once set in, advances with as terrible a rapidity as though Mr. Gladstone in person were the presiding genius of the ​scene; and before the end of the voyage the entire saloon is as deeply infected with the "virus of Particularism" as gallant little Wales itself.
To pick up a homeward-bound P. and O. at Gibraltar and to finish with her her journey to England is to assist at a truly melancholy drama of disenchantments. The deck is strewed with the fragments of lightly-made and lightly-broken eternal friendships and with the ashes of extinct flirtations. Bosoms which glowed with reciprocal passion in the Indian Ocean have cooled down in the Red Sea, and mutual admirations have given way to mutual criticism in the Suez Canal. But the short voyage allows no such scope for the display of this particular form of human weakness. It develops no worse characteristic than the somewhat fatuous form of complacent self-absorption which I have endeavoured to describe. And even this resolute refusal on the part of the average man to rise to the level of his ​august surroundings may in itself, perhaps, be regarded as a tribute to their majesty. The mind may be only taking refuge in little things from the oppression of great ones, just as Charles Lamb had, he tells us, to counteract the awe-inspiring impression of the mountains in the Lake Country by "thinking of the ham and beef shop in Vinegar-yard." After all, too, Nature can better afford to put up with the indifference of man in this case than in almost any other; since there is no situation in which at her pleasure she can so easily compel his homage. Her skies have but to frown upon him, her sea has but to wrinkle its terrible brows, and puny man is at once recalled to a due sense of her awful presence. When that happens he more than makes up for his former irreverence; and happen it did to us some forty-eight hours before reaching our destination. We foolishly overtook a gale—an error inexcusable to so slow a boat—and from six o'clock of one night till about the ​same hour on the following morning we did a good deal too much of Tennysonian "climbing up the climbing wave." Nature was then more than amply avenged upon those who had neglected to worship her in her gentler aspects. Many of them went, indeed, to the opposite extreme; for ere night fell they had exchanged their careless lounging postures for what it would be inadequate to describe as a mere attitude of worship. It was one of absolute prostration.