He was an Arab with a good-natured face, and as soon as the money was promised him he appeared to regard it as a sure thing. It is somewhat uncomplimentary to the natives of this country, that they are more inclined to trust strangers than each other. If an Egyptian official or merchant had made a promise like ours the conductor would have paid little heed to it as the chances would have been against fulfillment, but he accepted the word of a stranger without hesitation. Carriage drivers, donkey boys, and boatmen repeatedly told me “the foreigners always pay what they agree to, but the natives don’t.”
“We like to deal with you even when you make very close bargains because we feel sure of the money, but it isn’t so with the Egyptians and Turks.”
Cairo faded in the distance. We watched the arrowy spires of the Mosque of Mohammed Ali till they became the faintest of lines against the sky, and then went out altogether; we traced the group of mosques that cover the tombs of the Caliphs and are backed by the sandy hills of the Mokattam, and we studied the ensemble of mosques and minarets, and palm-trees, as long as study was possible. Then we turned to the grand old pyramids away on the western horizon, and when these disappeared we fixed our eyes on the course of the Nile, and the line that marked the termination of the fertile land and the beginning of the Desert.
The Desert soon disappeared, and we rode through the flat plain, carpeted with the richest of verdure, and furrowed here and there with great and small and medium canals. In some fields the crops appeared half grown; in others they were just beginning, and in others the plows—rude implements which the most careless farmer in America would disdain—were at work. The plow of Egypt is the same in appearance, and it may be the same identically, that was in use before the Pyramids were built, and before the foundation of Thebes, with her hundred gates. It is a billet of wood, pointed at the forward end, and furnished with a beam and an upright, the latter serving as a handle. A pair of oxen, or buffaloes, are the propelling power, and the yoke that fastens them together is a straight stick held in place by ropes or wooden pins.
Numerous sakkiehs, turned by oxen or buffaloes, were at work, and in nearly every instance the animals were blindfolded with pads of coarse straw-work over their eyes. Frequently we passed villages with mud walls, and with the general aspect of uncleanliness and discomfort that I had observed in upper Egypt, and that one observes in nearly all the native villages.
The thermometer stood at 100° in the shade and 118° in the sun, but so long as we kept in the shade it was not uncomfortable. The dryness of the Egyptian air makes the heat far more supportable than the same temperature in New York. I have suffered more at 85° on Manhattan Island than in Egypt at 100°, and I found it easier to move about there than in an American atmosphere fifteen degrees cooler. The natives were at work in the fields without any appearance of discomfort, but I observed that the buffaloes, where at liberty to do so, had sought the water and were lying there with only their heads visible.
At every station children came out to peddle water, which they carried in goolchs, or bottles of porous earth. For half a franc we bought one of these, goolch, water, and all—the girl excepted, though it is quite possible that a franc or two would have secured her.