The tall gyassas partly comforted Perry for the noisy bustle of the Alexandrian wharves, but his content was complete when, as the train turned to the southward, he saw in the distance a camel outlined against the sky-line. He felt that at last he really was in Egypt.
The train was bowling along rapidly over the outer stretches of the Delta and its alternate patches of desert, marsh and cotton field, with a few mud huts here and there, when, even above the clatter of the train, there came a hideous squeaking rattle.
“What in the wide world is that racket!” he ejaculated.
“Probably a sakiyeh,” was the reply.
“What’s a sakiyeh?”
“An old water-wheel. You’ll see it in a second.”
Then, a moment later, his friend added, “I thought so,” and pointed to where a fellah, or laborer, in his blue galabeah—which Perry inelegantly declared to be a nightshirt—stood beside the creaking water-wheel while a water-buffalo toilsomely trod round to raise the water to irrigate the land. The fellah looked up as the train sped by, and thus Perry caught his first glimpse of peasant labor.
“When Joseph was sold by his brethren into Egypt,” remarked Antoine, “he probably saw sakiyehs being worked just that way. Very little has changed since.”
“And those mud huts?”
“The Children of Israel made bricks without straw,” the other reminded him. “Bricks are only baked mud.”