Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/249

 shore, the whole of this steep declivity was packed from brow to base with white turbans, blue gullabias, brown faces, and flashing teeth. Not a foot of the bank was visible, save at the very edge of the water, so completely was it submerged beneath this cascade, this cataract of Oriental humanity.

It was as though notice had been given that "Egyptian fellahs may be shot here," and some colossus, suddenly endowed with life, had emptied a gigantic barrow-load of them down the bank. The little ones being the lightest, would naturally have rolled out first, and there, indeed, they are at the bottom of the slope, up to their knees in water and Nile mud, a dirty rag, which may have been a shirt under the Ptolemies, their only garment, and they themselves a mere incarnate cry for bakshîsh. Few of them get it, perhaps only one, the sole artist of the assembled multitude—a blind youth with an endearing gift of mimicry, which enables him to delight us for a quarter