Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/337

Rh Chehatah Hassan, a Bedouin Arab, a man of property near Cairo, who spoke a little English, French and Italian, undertook everything, provisioning the vessel, with a crew of eighteen, and arranging for the hire of camels and donkeys that we might need on the way, for a fixed sum. The vessel had two masts with lateen sails, like huge wings, and could make good way with the wind aft. Every night we tied up by the bank, making daily excursions to temples, villages, and places of interest. In winter months the climate is like an ideal summer's day at home, yet at night cold enough for a couple of blankets. Egypt is emphatically a land of light, brilliant, all-pervading light; there is scarcely any cloud scenery. Sunrise and sunset, such a contrast to the white light of midday, flood the atmosphere with colour that lies reflected on the river, veiling every peak and crevice of the barren dry sandstone ranges with hues of delicate beauty. It is on the Nile one understands the force of the old words, "the plague of darkness, a darkness that might be felt."

It is on the Nile, too, from the deck of a dahabyah, in leisure hours such as no train or steamer can give, you re-read the old story of Genesis, as if it were before your eyes. Men at work making bricks of Nile mud, stiffened with bits of grass and straw, drying them in the sun in moulds, just as they are pictured in hieroglyphics on the Temple walls; women morning and evening by the water side filling their water jars, their graceful garments, bracelets, anklets, of the same type which has survived from time immemorial. Every few hundred yards men raising water for irrigation with goatskin buckets, hung on long bamboo levers, and wheels of the same pattern as in the days