One may travel for league after league along this slimy water and make head for days and weeks against its current—­which glides everlastingly past the dahabiya, in little hurrying waves—­without seeing this warm, fecundating river, compared with which our rivers of France are mere negligible streams, either diminish or increase or hasten.  And on the right and left of us as we pass are unfolded indefinitely the two parallel chains of barren limestone, which imprison so narrowly the Egypt of the harvests:  on the west that of the Libyan desert, which every morning the first rays of the sun tint with a rosy coral that nothing seems to dull; and in the east that of the desert of Arabia, which never fails in the evening to retain the light of the setting sun, and looks then like a mournful girdle of glowing embers.  Sometimes the two parallel walls sheer off and give more room to the green fields, to the woods of palm-trees, and the little oases, separated by streaks of golden sand.  Sometimes they approach so closely to the Nile that habitable Egypt is no wider than some two or three poor fields of corn, lying right on the water’s edge, behind which the dead stones and the dead sands commence at once.  And sometimes, even, the desert chain closes in so as to overhang the river with its reddish-white cliffs, which no rain ever comes to freshen, and in which, at different heights, gape the square holes leading to the habitations of the mummies.  These mountains, which in the distance look so beautiful in their rose-colour, and make, as it were, interminable back-cloths to all that happens on the river banks, were perforated, during some 5000 years, for the introduction of sarcophagi and now they swarm with old dead bodies.

And all that passes on the banks, indeed, changes as little as the background.

First there is that gesture, supple and superb, but always the same, of the women in their long black robes who come without ceasing to fill their long-necked jars and carry them away balanced on their veiled heads.  Then the flocks which shepherds, draped in mourning, bring to the river to drink, goats and sheep and asses all mixed up together.  And then the buffaloes, massive and mud-coloured, who descend calmly to bathe.  And, finally, the great labour of the watering:  the traditional noria, turned by a little bull with bandaged eyes and, above all, the shaduf, worked by men whose naked bodies stream with the cold water.

The shadufs follow one another sometimes as far as the eye can see.  It is strange to watch the movement—­confused in the distance—­of all these long rods which pump the water without ceasing, and look like the swaying of living antennae.  The same sight was to be seen along this river in the times of the Ramses.  But suddenly, at some bend of the river, the old Pharaonic rigging disappears, to give place to a succession of steam machines, which, more even than the muscles of the fellahs, are busy at the water-drawing.  Before long their blackish chimneys will make a continuous border to the tamed Nile.