their lands uncultivated; should they declare that they were incapable of paying the contributions laid on them, the prison opened for them and their families.  If a dyke were cut, or the course of a channel altered, the nome was deprived of water:  prompt and inevitable ruin came upon the unfortunate inhabitants, and their property, confiscated by the treasury in payment of the tax, passed for a small consideration into the hands of the scribe or of the dishonest administrator.  Two or three years of neglect were almost enough to destroy a system of irrigation:  the canals became filled with mud, the banks crumbled, the inundation either failed to reach the ground, or spread over it too quickly and lay upon it too long.  Famine soon followed with its attendant sicknesses:  men and animals died by the hundred, and it was the work of nearly a whole generation to restore prosperity to the district.

The lot of the fellah of old was, as we have seen, as hard as that of the fellah of to-day.  He himself felt the bitterness of it, and complained at times, or rather the scribes complained for him, when with selfish complacency they contrasted their calling with his.  He had to toil the whole year round,—­digging, sowing, working the shadouf from morning to night for weeks, hastening at the first requisition to the corvee, paying a heavy and cruel tax,—­all without even the certainty of enjoying what remained to him in peace, or of seeing his wife and children profit by it.  So great, however, was the elasticity of his temperament that his misery was not sufficient to depress him:  those monuments upon which his life is portrayed in all its minutias, represent him as animated with inexhaustible cheerfulness.  The summer months ended, the ground again becomes visible, the river retires into its bed, the time of sowing is at hand:  the peasant takes his team and his implements with him and goes off to the fields.  In many places, the soil, softened by the water, offers no resistance, and the hoe easily turns it up; elsewhere it is hard, and only yields to the plough.  While one of the farm-servants, almost bent double, leans his whole weight on the handles to force the ploughshare deep into the soil, his comrade drives the oxen and encourages them by his songs:  these are only two or three short sentences, set to an unvarying chant, and with the time beaten on the back of the nearest animal.  Now and again he turns round towards his comrade and encourages him:  “Lean hard!”—­“Hold fast!”

[Illustration:  142a.jpg TWO FELLAHIN WORK THE SHADOUF IN A GARDEN]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph.

The sower follows behind and throws handfuls of grain into the furrow:  a flock of sheep or goats brings up the rear, and as they walk, they tread the seed into the ground.  The herdsmen crack their whips and sing some country song at the top of their voices,—­based on the complaint of some fellah seized by the corvee to clean out a canal.  “The digger is in the water with the fish,—­he talks to the silurus, and exchanges greetings with the oxyrrhynchus:—­West! your digger is a digger from the West!"*