of the river. On one side the masts of an
anchored boat lean against a grove of locust
trees, in which a cloud of pigeons comes to
settle, loading them as if with huge white
flowers. On the opposite bank a long dense
wood of sycamores and acacias just allows
the setting sun to be seen in fragments like
a distant conflagration. A mass of strangely-
contorted clouds, with broken rainbows here
and there, tapestries nearly the whole circuit
of the heavens. The lake-like reach of the
river is steeped in the most gorgeous colours.
It glows full of light from brim to brim, and
burning eddies and rosy ripples come
trembling tip to kiss our cheeks as we are
bathing. The world below, borrowing all
the beauty of the heavens, seems to borrow
also their transparency, and shines and
glitters as if about to dissolve like a soap
bubble.

On the shore we observe the gisrs or
embankments, of heights varying from ten to
twenty feet, by which communication is kept
up between the villages. These gisrs are
pierced here and there by sluice-gates, for they
are accompanied by a system of canals, which
in the summer become dry and choked with
mud. To keep canals and gisrs in repair
much labour is required, and this the fellahs,
or Egyptian villagers, are forced to furnish
at wages that will barely maintain life even
in Egypt. A gang of five or six hundred fellahs
– men, women, and children – may be met
often by the traveller, listlessly at work with
mattock and basket, under the eyes of
appointed taskmasters – Arabs, like themselves
– armed with swords and whips. And though,
by taking earth to raise the gisr from the
neighbouring canal which they have also to
deepen, they might get through two labours
with the toil of one, they may be seen
actually digging here and there deep, useless
holes in a field covered with green corn.

The villagers of Egypt are good fellows,
but they have no motive to industry. Much
of their life is spent in task labour, and if
they earn more for themselves than bare
subsistence, any superfluity that they may
be discovered to possess is wrung from them
by the officers of government. Extortion
and cheating, garnished abundantly with
blows, pervade the whole system of government
in Egypt. The Governors of the great
provinces are Turks, but the minor districts
all have native officers of peasant origin,
called Nazirs, who bring to the village doors
the system of oppression. They are not
loved the worse for it. They do as they are
done by; they are beaten, and they beat.
Excessive taxes are of course demanded of
the fellahs, who of course, if they be
respectable refuse to pay, of course are horsed
in Eton style, and suffer the naboot. Blows
are honourable, and the man is to be envied
who has suffered most, and allowed the least
quantity of money to be tortured from him.
It is all done in a quiet family way. The
sheikh of a hamlet sits under the palms in
his market-place. The fellah who has paid
his quarterly tax and taken his naboot by
way of assurance that no more can be
extracted from him, goes and squats down as
easily as in his sore condition he is able,
quietly to see the same process gone through
with his neighbour, accepts a pipe from a
friend whose turn is yet to come, and slily
boasts of the few fuddahs he has saved,
though he had held them in reserve under
his tongue to pay in case the torture should
prove unendurable. The sheikh appeals to
Allah and the Prophet, does a hard day's
work, and when he has raised the amount
that he thinks sufficient, goes home in hope
that he may be able in his turn to keep back
a small proportion for himself. The Nazir
of the district, however, keeps an eye upon
the sheikhs of the villages, whose turn it
now is to suffer, for the Nazir wants enough
to satisfy the Governor of his province –
through whose hands the money next will
pass – and at the same time to yield a portion
to his private pocket. But the Governor,
who also wants to pocket pickings, holds the
naboot over the Nazirs, and so on through
every step.

When not collecting taxes, the sheikh is
admired in the village as its most respectable
first citizen. The fellahs treat him with
respectful familiarity. The principal men of
the village – the oldest and best behaved –
collect about him in the evening, and talk
politics over the pipe and the coffee cup.

Many of the Egyptian villages are mere
miserable heaps of huts, around and among
which rise palm trees, one or more of which
belongs to each family. There is no visible
mosque, but a room is generally set apart
for public prayer. In larger villages the
houses are still chiefly of one story, but
many have an upper room used as a dwelling,
with stores, donkeys, goats, and other
property below. The upper floor is reached by
an external staircase, and contains two or
three rooms, each reached by a separate door
from the open landing. The roof is of palm
rafters, covered thickly with clay. The
sheikh's house is, of course, on a larger scale,
and in the neighbourhood of some populous
villages are to be seen neat white houses
in gardens, belonging to Nazirs and other
great men. In such villages there is also
commonly a grain store. The mosque is
known by a pepper-box minaret, or an
indented parapet of a terrace in the Saracenic
style. There is a coffee-house with a carved
woodwork front, a barber's shop with lofty
narrow divans, and a square roofed with
dhourra stalks, through which the sunlight
filters upon stalls called shops, and women
squatted on the ground who offer for sale
trays of bread and heaps of vegetables.

The house of an ordinary villager has two
rooms, furnished with mud divans raised
a few inches from the floor. Its most