: "What lad among you, when the season is over, can say:
'It is I who say it, to thee and to my comrades, you are all of you but
idlers!'--Who among you can say: 'An active lad for the job am I!'" A
servant moves among the gang with a tall jar of beer, offering it to
those who wish for it. "Is it not good!" says he; and the one who drinks
answers politely: "'Tis true, the master's beer is better than a cake
of durra!" The sheaves once bound, are carried to the singing of fresh
songs addressed to the donkeys who bear them: "Those who quit the ranks
will be tied, those who roll on the ground will be beaten,--Geeho!
then." And thus threatened, the ass trots forward. Even when a tragic
element enters the scene, and the bastinado is represented, the
sculptor, catching the bantering spirit of the people among whom he
lives, manages to insinuate a vein of comedy. A peasant, summarily
condemned for some misdeed, lies flat upon the ground with bared back:
two friends take hold of his arms, and two others his legs, to keep him
in the proper position. His wife or his son intercedes for him to the
man with the stick: "For mercy's sake strike on the ground!" And as a
fact, the bastinado was commonly rather a mere form of chastisement than
an actual punishment: the blows, dealt with apparent ferocity, missed
their aim and fell upon the earth; the culprit howled loudly, but was
let off with only a few bruises.

An Arab writer of the Middle Ages remarks, not without irony, that the
Egyptians were perhaps the only people in the world who never kept any
stores of provisions by them, but each one went daily to the market to
buy the pittance for his family. The improvidence which he laments
over in his contemporaries had been handed down from their most remote
ancestors. Workmen, fellahin, _employes_, small townsfolk, all lived
from hand to mouth in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. Pay-days were almost
everywhere days of rejoicing and extra eating: no one spared either
the grain, oil, or beer of the treasury, and copious feasting continued
unsparingly, as long as anything was left of their wages. As their
resources were almost always exhausted before the day of distribution
once more came round, beggary succeeded to fulness of living, and a part
of the population was literally starving for several days. This almost
constant alternation of abundance and dearth had a reactionary
influence on daily work: there were scarcely any seignorial workshops