A NILE STEAMER.
CHAPTER VIII
ON THE NILE
In my ears is the sound as of the tuning up of a thousand fiddles! I hear the agonising scrape of strings, the squeal of the bows! I have heard it all before at many a concert, but this time it is intensified a thousandfold and penetrates even into my dreams. I imagine I am in a concert hall and spring up wildly with the intention of getting outside until the music begins, but the movement wakes me, and behold I am not at a concert in London on a dim Sunday afternoon, but in a brilliantly white two-berth cabin with the sun flooding in through the square window! Peering out I see we are running smoothly along up-stream close in to a high mud bank, and that is where the noise comes from. It is caused by the squeaking of one wooden rod against another as hundreds of Egyptian fellaheen raise the water from the Nile to moisten their crops.
It is not long before we are both dressed and out to examine the curious sight. The banks are about the height of a high room, and at the distance of, it may be, fifty yards, all the way along them there are deep cuts like miniature denes, or chines, running down to the water. At the foot of each of these a brown-skinned man stands with his bare feet at the edge of the water, gripping with his toes to save himself from slipping in the mud. At this time in the morning he is clothed in a quantity of garments, mostly mud-colour, but as the sun grows strong he throws them aside and stands forth a fine bronze statue with his skin gleaming in the clear light. Just above his head there is a pole bridging the cut, or chine, and fastened to the middle of it at right angles is another, which swings up and down upon it like a see-saw.
A huge lump of mud like a swollen football is plastered on to the far end of this, and at the other end a basket or basin made of skin is attached to a string. The mud ball is heavy, and when it is allowed to go free it hangs down to the ground; but the brown man constantly reaches up and raises it by pulling down the basin, which he dips in the Nile water, then lets the heavy end swing it up as high as his head, when he tips it up, and the water from it flows into a pool at that height. Another man stands on the edge of this pool and he has a similar arrangement, by means of which he raises the water out of the pool with a basin like the first, and there may be another above him, and another again. This primitive arrangement is called a shaduf, and by its means the water from the Nile is lifted up to the surface of the fields, where it runs away in miniature channels to water the roots of the maize. This is one of the most extraordinary sights in the world. Think of all the mills in which machinery does delicate work like that of the human hand; think of the patterns made by the machines, of the newspapers printed and folded with very little human guidance, and then leap back to this clumsy device used now by the Egyptian as it was used by his ancestors thousands of years ago! A few pints of muddy water raised by a weight, half of it falling out of the badly constructed basin as it goes, and the same drop of water handled again and again by four men till the tiny trickle reaches the fields! We watch with amazement. The shrieking and squeaking of the shadufs goes on, the brown figures stoop down, rise again, and swing with regularity, minute after minute. We steam on round the next corner and see more of them and yet more again; how many have we not seen already in the short time we have been on deck? Multiply that times without number for all the miles we came up by train and double it to include both banks! Imagination gives way!
A "SHADUF."