r mounts to
the fields of corn and lucerne. And then three "shadufs," one above
the other, creak together, lowering and raising their great scarabaeus'
horns to the rhythm of the same song.

All along the banks of the Nile this movement of the antennae of the
shadufs is to be seen. It had its beginning in the earliest ages and
is still the characteristic manifestation of human life along the river
banks. It ceases only in the summer, when the river, swollen by the
rains of equatorial Africa, overflows this land of Egypt, which it
itself has made in the midst of the Saharan sands. But in the winter,
which is here a time of luminous drought and changeless blue skies, it
is in full swing. Then every day, from dawn until the evening prayer,
the men are busy at their water-drawing, transformed for the time into
tireless machines, with muscles that work like metal bands. The action
never changes, any more than the song, and often their thoughts must
wander from their automatic toil, and lose themselves in some dream,
akin to that of their ancestors who were yoked to the same rigging four
or five thousands years ago. Their torsos, deluged at each rising of the
overflowing bucket, stream constantly with cold water; and sometimes the
wind is icy, even while the sun burns; but these perpetual workers are,
as we have said, of bronze, and their hardened bodies take no harm.

These men are the fellahs, the peasants of the valley of the Nile--pure
Egyptians, whose type has not changed in the course of centuries. In the
oldest of the bas-reliefs of Thebes or Memphis you may see many such,
with the same noble profile and thickish lips, the same elongated eyes
shadowed by heavy eyelids, the same slender figure, surmounted by broad
shoulders.

The women who from time to time descend to the river, to draw water
also, but in their case in the vases of potters' clay which they
carry--this fetching and carrying of the life-giving water is the one
primordial occupation in this Egypt, which has no rain, nor any living
spring, and subsists only by its river--these women walk and posture
with an inimitable grace, draped in black veils, which even the poorest
allow to trail behind them, like the train of a court dress. In this
bright land, with its rose-coloured distances, it is strange to see
them, all so sombrely clothed, spots of mourning, as it were, in the
gay fields and the flaring desert. Machine-like creatures, all untaught,
they yet p