termites than
that of men. Often half the village--if such a name can be given to
these earthen huts--has been washed away by the rains or sapped by the
flood; but no great harm is done; with a few handfuls of mud the house
is soon rebuilt, and five or six days of sunshine suffice to make it
inhabitable.

This description, scrupulously exact, does not give a very attractive
idea of a fellahin village; but plant by the side of these cubes of gray
earth a clump of date palms, have a camel or two kneel down in front of
the doors, which look like the mouths of warrens, let a woman come out
from one of them draped in her long blue gown, holding a child by the
hand and bearing a jar of water on her head, light it all up with
sunlight, and you have a charming and characteristic picture.

The thing which strikes the most inattentive traveller as soon as he
steps into this Lower Egypt, where from time immemorial the Nile has
been accumulating its mud in thin layers, is the close intimacy of the
fellah and the earth. Autochthone is the name that best fits him; he
springs from the clay which he treads, he is made out of it, and scarce
has emerged from it. He manipulates it, presses it as a child presses
its nurse's breast, to draw from its brown bosom the milk of fertility.
He sinks waist-deep into its fertile mud, drains it, waters it, dries
it, according to its needs; cuts canals in it, builds up levees upon it,
draws from it the clay with which he constructs his family dwelling and
with which he will cement his tomb. Never was a respectful son more
careful of his old mother; he does not leave her as do those vagabond
children who forsake their natal roof in search of adventures. He
remains there, always attentive to the least want of his antique
ancestor, the black earth of Kame. If she thirsts, he gives her drink,
if she is troubled by too much humidity, he dries it; in order not to
wound her, he works her almost without tools, with his hands; his
plough merely scratches the telluric skin, which the inundation covers
each year with a new epidermis. As you watch him going and coming upon
that soaking ground, you feel that he is in his element. In his blue
garment, which resembles a pontiff's robe, he presides over the marriage
of earth and water, he unites the two principles which, warmed by the
sun, give birth to life. Nowhere is this harmony between man and the
soil so visible; nowhere does the earth play so important a part