It was nearly dark when we reached Assûan. The cafés were all alight and astir. There was smoking and coffee-drinking going on outside; there were sounds of music and laughter within. A large private house on the opposite side of the road was being decorated as if for some festive occasion. Flags were flying from the roof, and two men were busy putting up a gayly-painted inscription over the doorway. Asking, as was natural, if there was a marriage or a fantasia afoot, it was not a little startling to be told that these were signs of mourning, and that the master of the house had died during the interval that elapsed between our riding out and riding back again. In Egypt, where the worship of ancestry and the preservation of the body were once among the most sacred duties of the living, they now make short work with their dead. He was to be buried, they said, to-morrow morning, three hours after sunrise. CHAPTER XI. THE CATARACT AND THE DESERT. At Assûan one bids good-by to Egypt and enters Nubia through the gates of the cataract--which is, in truth, no cataract but a succession of rapids extending over two-thirds of the distance between Elephantine and Philæ. The Nile--diverted from its original course by some unrecorded catastrophe, the nature of which has given rise to much scientific conjecture--here spreads itself over a rocky basin bounded by sand-slopes on the one side and by granite cliffs on the other. Studded with numberless islets, divided into numberless channels, foaming over sunken rocks, eddying among water-worn bowlders, now shallow, now deep, now loitering, now hurrying, here sleeping in the ribbed hollow of a tiny sand-drift, there circling above the vortex of a hidden whirlpool, the river, whether looked upon from the deck of the dahabeeyah or the heights along the shore, is seen everywhere to be fighting its way through a labyrinth, the paths of which have never yet been mapped or sounded. Those paths are everywhere difficult and everywhere dangerous; and to that labyrinth the shellalee, or cataract Arab, alone possesses the key. At the time of the inundation, when all but the highest rocks are under water and navigation is as easy here as elsewhere, the shellalee’s occupation is gone. But as the floods subside and travelers begin to reappear, his work commences. To haul dahabeeyahs up those treacherous rapids by sheer stress of rope and muscle; to steer skillfully down again through channels bristling with rocks and boiling with foam, becomes now, for some five months of the year, his principal industry. It is hard work, but he gets well paid for it, and his profits are always on the increase. From forty to fifty dahabeeyahs are annually taken up between November and March; and every year brings a larger influx of travelers. Meanwhile, accidents rarely happen; prices tend continually upward; and the cataract-Arabs make a little fortune by their singular monopoly.[53]