Discoveries in Egypt, Ethiopia and the Peninsula of Sinai, in the Years 1842-1845, During the Mission Sent Out by His Majesty, Frederick William IV of Prussia
9781465678416
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
All our endeavours were taxed to the utmost to render our departure on the 1st of September possible; one day’s delay would have cost us a whole month, and this month it was necessary to gain by redoubled activity. My trip to Paris, where I arrived in thirty hours from London, was unavoidable; two days were all that could be spared for the necessary purchases, letters, and notes, after which I returned richly laden from that city, ever so interesting and instructive to me. In London I obtained two other pleasant travelling companions, Bonomi and Wild, who had readily resolved to take part in the expedition. The former, long well known as a traveller in Egypt and Ethiopia, is not only full of practical knowledge of life in that country, but is also a fine connoisseur of Egyptian art, and a master in Egyptian drawing; the latter, a young genial-minded architect, enthusiastically seeks in the Orient new materials for his rich woof of combination. At length everything was bought, prepared, packed, and we had said farewell to all our friends. Bunsen only, with his usual kindness and untiring friendship, accompanied us to Southampton, the place of embarkation, where he spent the evening with us. As one usually arrives at a sudden, scarce comprehensible quietude, on entering a harbour from the stormy sea, after long and mighty excitement, and yet seems to feel the earth swimming beneath one, and to hear the breakers dashing around, so did it happen to me in a contrary manner, when, from the whirl of the last days and weeks in the haven, from the immeasurable world-city, I entered on the uniform desert of the ocean, in the narrow-bounded, soon-traversed house of planks. And now there was nothing more to be provided, nothing to be hurried; our long row of packages, more than thirty in number, had vanished, box by box, into the murky hold; our sleeping-places required no preparation, as they would scarcely hold more than our persons. The want of anxiety caused for some time a new and indefinite uneasiness, a solicitude without any object of solicitude. Among our fellow-passengers I mention only the missionary Lieder, who, a German by birth, is returning with his English wife to Cairo. There he has founded and conducted a school since 1828, under the auspices of the English Missionary Society, which is now destined exclusively for the children of the Koptic Christians. Lieder has introduced into this school the study of the Koptic tongue, and thus once more brought into honour that remarkable and most ancient language of the country, which for several centuries has been totally superseded among the people by the Arabic. The Scriptures are, however, yet extant in the Koptic tongue, and even used in the service, but they are only intoned, and no longer understood.
