Their pay is issued from Cairo; sometimes they marry each others daughters, rarely marry the women of the country, and the son, or nephew, or nearest relation of each deceased, succeeds as janissary in room of his father. They have lost their native language, and have indeed nothing of the Turk in them, but a propensity to violence, rapine, and injustice; to which they have joined the perfidy of the Arab, which, as I have said, they sometimes inherit from their mother. An Aga commands these troops in the castle. They have about two hundred horsemen armed with firelocks; with which, by the help of the Ababdé, encamped at Shekh Ammer, they keep the Bishareen, and all these numerous tribes of Arabs, that inhabit the Desert of Sennaar, in tolerable order.
The inhabitants, merchants, and common people of the town, are commanded by a cacheff. There is neither butter nor milk at Syene (the latter comes from Lower Egypt) the same may be said of fowls. Dates do not ripen at Syene, those that are sold at Cairo come from Ibrim and Dongola. There are good fish in the Nile, and they are easily caught, especially at the cataract, or in broken water; there are only two kinds of large ones which I have happened to see, the binny and the boulti. The binny I have described in its proper place.
After passing the tomb-stones without the gate, we come to a plain about five miles long, bordered on the left by a hill of no considerable height, and sandy like the plain, upon which are seen some ruins, more modern than those Egyptian buildings we have described, They seem indeed to be a mixture of all kinds and ages.
The distance from the gate of the town to Termissi, or Marada, the small villages on the cataract, is exactly six English miles. After the description already given of this cataract in some authors, a traveller has reason to be surprised, when arrived on its banks, to find that vessels sail up the cataract, and consequently the fall cannot be so violent as to deprive people of their hearing[142].
The bed of the river, occupied by the water, was not then half a mile broad. It is divided into a number of small channels, by large blocks of granite, from thirty to forty feet high. The current, confined for a long course between the rocky mountains of Nubia, tries to expand itself with great violence. Finding, in every part before it, opposition from the rocks of granite, and forced back by these, it meets the opposite currents. The chafing of the water against these huge obstacles, the meeting of the contrary currents one with another, creates such a violent ebullition, and makes such a noise and disturbed appearance, that it fills the mind with confusion rather than with terror.