I visited in a home on the banks of the Nile and watched with interested eyes the life around me: saw the mother attend to her household duties in the morning, giving the servants directions for the day’s work, measuring and weighing out the stores to the cook, and taking his accounts as he came from the market-place with the day’s provisions. An old blind woman came in the morning to give the children their lesson in the Koran. She would start a surah, then the children would repeat the remaining verses in a sing-song voice, the slightest break in the intonation calling forth a rebuke from the leader, whose nodding head kept time to the chant. At nine o’clock the older children took their books under their arms and started for the village school, in the same noisy manner as do our children at home. I watched the fellaheen as they lifted the water from the river to irrigate the thirsty fields, and saw the black-robed women filling their water-jars and placing them upon their heads with a beautiful sweeping gesture, walk gracefully away to their little mud huts that could scarcely be distinguished from the sands around them.
Trains of camels passed our wall on their way to the distant city, and the shepherd boys drove their flocks of sheep and goats in search of pasture. I remembered Browning’s beautiful David, who sang:—
And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as one after one
So docile they come to the pen door till folding is done.
They are white and untorn by bushes, for lo, they have fed
Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream’s bed.
And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star
Into eve and the blue far above us—so blue and so far.
We watched the little boys ride the great unwieldy water buffaloes to the water side, slipping off their backs to allow them, groaning with content, to wallow in the sluggish waters, and when the hard white stars came out in the sapphire sky, we looked far over the Libyan hills, which had changed from the gold and opal of sunset to the grey blue that heralds the coming of the Egyptian night. The evening breeze that always comes with the setting of the sun brought the smell of the desert to us, and the deep swish of the Nile came as an accompaniment to the cry of the muezzin from the tiny mosque in the distance, and we saw its response in the fellah kneeling beside his waiting camel, lifting his hands to the heavens, as the clear, bell-like voice came over the evening air:—
There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet.