THE NORTHERNMOST HAMLET.
Holding on your course, you find that you have passed out of the dead world of the fens into one of teeming life. Of this the aspect of the northernmost hamlet on the canal may have forewarned you, for scores of fishing nets were spread there to wind and sun, beside a little fleet of keelless craft, and a Copt was selling to all comers the last night’s draught of fish. The catch of each crew is offered in gross. A salesman, squatting on a mat, stirs the throbbing pile, working the larger fish to the top. A fat one he puts by in a palm-leaf pannier for the Copt, a second for his writer, a third for himself, and the residue is bid for at ten, twenty, forty piastres, sold, packed on asses, and driven off to be marshmen’s food for many miles around. The fishy wealth of the Lagoon is amazing. Silvery shapes leap in air by tens and twenties, and passing shoals leave wakes in every direction. Boats at anchor, boats adrift, boats under full sail, multiply as one runs northward; and out of the horizon spring groves of poles crossed by poles aslant, masts and yards of invisible hulls moored by invisible islets, whose sandy levels are all but awash. There must be hundreds of craft plying on Lake Burullos, and its fisher-folk are legion—men of blond colouring, active and somewhat silent, with the refined facial type common to old inbred races. Their women often recalled to me pictures that I had seen on the Pharaonic monuments.
The farther shore does not begin to rise on the north-eastern horizon till a dozen barren islets have slipped astern. The higher dunes emerge first, uplifted in a shimmering mirage, roseate and yellow like cumulus lit by sunset. One into another they run, till they become a continuous range, spotted with black tufts, which are the plumes of half-buried palms. A cluster of huts to the left, with square upstanding blocks, is the village of Borg, whose dismantled fort and coastguard station mark the shrunken Sebennytic estuary of Nile. Rank odours of curing come down the wind from its drying grounds which supply half the poor of Lower Egypt. On the starboard bow, as you wear round the last island and set a course due east, a large dark stain resolves itself into a little town distinguished by a minaret or two, which is set on a hillock backed by golden dunes and palms. A forest of naked masts and yards bristles on the lake before it—the fleet of Baltim, chief settlement of the fisher-folk, and the old see, Parallos.
CAMELS LOADING AT BALTIM.
The lake floor here has so slight a slope that a mile from its marge the water is still only inches deep, and the grounded feluccas must discharge their freights on to camels, which are trained against nature to receive their loads standing and wade unconcerned to the shore. Naked children splash all day in the shoal-water, plying tiny javelins and little casting-nets, so far out as to seem no bigger than gulls; and there could be no healthier or happier babes than this amphibious brood, whose playground is the Lagoon. Their fathers and mothers seem to pass the day on the vast stretch of sandy beach, coopering boats, buying and selling fish, chattering, sleeping in the sun. It is astonishing to see so clean a life in Egypt, a life unfouled by the viscous ink of the Nile mud. Even the huts are not built of clay, but of ancient Roman bricks dug out of mounds south of the Lagoon, and long ago mellowed to a dusky red that tones to admiration with the yellow dunes and the dark greenery of the palms. Bee-hive shelters, byres and fences are wattled of dry palm-fronds.
HALF BURIED PALM-FOREST, BALTIM.
Coming out of the great southern flats to this long sand-belt, which fences the northern sea, one has an illusion of upland, and, climbing over the sliding dunes, credits with difficulty that the land falls to the Nile level in every deeper hollow. Here palms, planted deep, are bearing abundantly, though the dunes in their constant eastward progression bury them to the spring of their plumes. Potatoes, too, and tomatoes are grown behind long alignments of sheltering wattles; nor even on the dunes is there lacking a wild, waxy pasture whose roots trail fifty or sixty feet to find a moister soil. A region not dissimilar may be seen from the Rosetta railway, and Edku, by its lake, is a village somewhat like Baltim. But there is no view west of the Nile to rival that from the higher dunes of Baltim; nothing like its forest of sand-choked palms stretched ribandwise between the low lake-dunes and the golden seaward hillocks; nothing like the ample prospect of its lake, fringed with fisher hamlets, alive with splashing children, and bearing a distant burden of myriad amber sails.