Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/56

 the animated life of the streets and bazaars. As we sat on our balcony, and listened once more to the music from the square below, it seemed as if the band were playing a Chant du Depart, and we knew that our time had come. But we both felt regret at leaving the most Oriental of cities, with perhaps the single exception of Damascus; and as we rolled away, we kept looking back at the Pyramids, as with other companions I had looked back at the dome of St. Peter's as we departed from Rome. The Delta is not unlike the Campagna in its broad sweep and limitless horizon, and never did it appear in greater beauty. The Springtime had long since come, and already the land was rejoicing with the joy of its first harvest — a harvest not of grain, but of grass. As far as the eye could reach, the fields were in bloom with clover. These rich, juicy grasses are the chief dependence of the Arabs for the support of their beasts of burden, and the harvest is gathered with the greatest care. It is not done by patent mowers, as on our Western prairies; but the Arabs, scattering over the plain with their sickles, clear each a rod or two of ground, just enough to make a load for a camel, and piling them in huge bundles on their backs, a procession of these moving haystacks goes swinging along the road into Cairo. This clover-harvest lasts only a few weeks, but it is a very pretty sight, presenting a boundless sea of verdure, and illustrating the exhaustless fertility of the Valley of the Nile.

And now we leave the great river behind us, and move out on the broad spaces of the Delta, where we find resemblances to other landscapes than the Campagna. If we could but take away the miserable Arab villages, and in their places introduce a few windmills and dykes and canals, we might be in Holland; or if we were to go still farther, and strip the landscape of all but what nature has