“‘God made the country and man made the town;’ I prefer the latter,” wrote a child. Man also made the Suez Canal and the ships upon it, and God made the Salt Lakes and their navies, and most people still agree with the child and prefer the former.
I had heard much about the first, and little about the second, when I landed in Egypt one November and went by train to Ismailia. On the left lay the famous little ditch, and the great ships looking incredibly tiny crept along it; and on the right lay out the great shallow lakes, and from the edge to the horizon they were as full of feathered fowl as Mother Carey’s Peace Pool.
Here in front all over the water were crowds of little birds, wild ducks maybe, dotted singly, fishing for themselves, and right away lay the flocks of flamingoes, flushing rose as they stood, flashing scarlet as they wheeled, till the flocks on the horizon looked like a sunset cloud. Late in the spring I passed again, and saw not the birds but the reason of the birds. The first time it had been a brilliant, sparkling morning, the second time it was a scarlet sunset. Where the rose-tinted flocks had touched the sky the sun now set behind bars, and where the little birds had floated singly the Arabs were drawing a net—the dark figures, each with his fisher’s coat girt round him, stood out against the crimsoned water; as they drew in round after round the silver fish leaped against the meshes, and the sound of their rustling came up to our ears as the train halted.
It is but the lean kine that the Israelites have left in the land of Goshen; yet if I was a tethered beast with scanty pasture I should feel some little comfort in having for company such a vision of whiteness as the paddy bird. To unaccustomed eyes it seems the image of the ibis, though it is not really the same; and it runs in and out over the parched fields, among the heads of the cattle.
There is peace in Cairo now among the Easterns and the Westerns, but there never can be peace between the kites and crows. The feud is carried on in the tops of the palm trees of the gardens. In one fierce contest the bone of contention fell to the ground and I went to find the cause of this eternal feud. It was no more and no less than a dead rat. At the river side they have ample material for contention, and I have seen as many as fifty great hawks or kites together hovering about the masts of the boats.
The kites are seen at their best in a little desert city near. There is not so much noise but that you can hear their musical whistle, and watch their great stately quadrilles in the air, three or four wheeling, poising, passing with swoops and curves against the blue.
A lovelier, more peaceful little bird haunts the palm gardens—the cinnamon and ashen dove which seeks the woods of England in the summer. Ten of them came home by our own boat one spring. They crept on behind it on wearied wing till we pitied them, and hoped they would alight and rest. Suddenly we all saw a sailing ship a mile or two away. With one accord the doves turned and made towards it, but not liking it on nearer view they turned again, caught us up without the least trouble, and again limped along on the wing beside us. But we were comforted for their fatigue.
In November the waters round Cairo had only just gone down, and the fields near Gizeh were all mud. When evening fell there used to come a wedge-shaped flock of pelicans from the desert. The great birds wheeled round the top of Chufu’s pyramid, and went off to their fishing.
Each little village up the Nile has its own pigeon tower built four-square, and bristling with sticks for the birds to perch. All the village owns these towers, and round them the pretty flocks clap their wings and take their brisk flights, merry and quick as Arab boys.