Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/169

Rh nothing of the great river on whose banks he lives save in its sole aspect of the beneficent helpmeet in his labours. He knows it in its annual bounty of rich alluvium, and as the great reservoir from which, at vast expenditure of labour, he irrigates his plot of land; but otherwise he recks little of it, and asks nothing save that it shall offer its broad bosom to the heavy-laden lateen-sailed grain-boats that bear his produce to the market.

See him as he bends at the shadûf with which, unchanged in form and mechanic principle, his forefathers of three thousand years ago drew water under the Pharoahs. Spare, graceful, active, trained "to fiddlestrings," and looking as fit to run for his life as the fleetest and most Mercury-like of those saïses who do actually run for their living before the carriages of the "quality" at Cairo, behold him, one of two, sometimes one of three or four, men engaged together hour after hour in the monotonous and, to a European, the heart-breaking labour of watering a plain with