"This is the height of enjoyment," said a member of our party one day while we were lounging in easy chairs taking afternoon tea on the deck, and lazily watching the panoramic scenes as the Amasis steamed down the river.
DOTTED WITH PILES OF YELLOW WATER-JARS.
It was scenes like these we looked upon. Along the banks of the river at short intervals, the shadoof man, or drawer of water, with his shadoof resembling an old-fashioned spring-pole or well sweep, drew up his dripping bucket and lowered it again, his only garment an apron at the waist.
All through the day the red-brown man
Stands on his perch in the red-brown bank;
Waters never more gratefully ran,
Cucumbers never more greedily drank.
—Canon Rawnsley.
Where the bank was very high, a series of two, three, or four natives, each with his spring-pole, raised the water one to the other until it reached the top and was poured into the little channels that carried it over the rich, but very thirsty soil of a rainless land. On the river-bank, also, interspersed with the shadoofs of the poorer class of agriculturists, the more prosperous farmers, who were the happy possessors of buffaloes or camels, lifted the irrigating water from the stream by means of sakiyehs, or wooden power wheels, which creaked unceasingly as the patient camels or buffaloes, with eyes covered by blinders of mud, trod round and round the wheel.
Rough clout upon his patient head,
The stately camel round doth go,
With gentle hesitating tread;
And yoked, and blind with frontlets, made
Of black Nile mud, the buffalo
Plies with him his unequal trade.
—Canon Rawnsley.
A large Dahabeah with rugs, easy chairs, and piano on deck, and the stars and stripes hanging listlessly overhead, floated by, propelled by fourteen Arab rowers—there being no wind to fill the sails. A drove of gray buffaloes, forty in number, were taking their bath, splashing the water like a party of schoolboys in a swimming pool. A group of women filled earthen jars at the water's edge, and with the dripping jars on their heads mounted the steep river bank. Here and there were irregular groups of mud huts, intersected by crooked alleys and surrounded by date palms, little villages where doves were flying overhead and from which came the sound of barking dogs to mingle with the puffs of the steamer. Flat-bottomed boats freighted with sugar cane lay with drooping sails in a noonday calm, or, later in the day, sped before the evening breeze. Near the pottery towns the river banks were dotted with yellow water jars in scattered piles ready for shipment to the city market. Immense stacks of the sugar-cane just harvested had been brought to the shore for conveyance to the sugar factories. And fields of cotton covered with white bloom extended into the distance.
We could see, too, the fertile Nile valley, not more than ten miles in breadth at its widest part, bounded on both sides by ranges of yellow, barren cliffs. On the western side the cliffs were farthest away; on the eastern side the valley was narrow, and the cliffs were sometimes distant, sometimes so near that they completely crowded out the cultivable soil and approached to the water's edge.
"There is something peculiar in the air of this dry land," observed one of the tourists after sitting quiet awhile. "The atmosphere lends a softness to the outlines of distant objects and adds delicate tints in the afternoon light. See how the barren cliffs are glorified with a flush of pink, the wheat fields are a brilliant green, and the barley fields, almost ready for the harvest, are golden. Even the mud huts and the white-washed mosque of that village on the western shore have lost their crude outlines and have become picturesque. At sunset the western sky will change to crimson and the eastern cliffs will change to gold. The sunsets, though, are not so gorgeous in coloring, nor do they show such striking contrasts as I have seen occasionally in my western home, but they are beautiful."