- Seem To Be Everywhere,
Standing Calmly In The Sun.
Very gentle, very tender, although perhaps
not very true, are the Bedouins at the Pyramids.
Up the Nile the
fellaheen smile as kindly as the policemen, smile protectingly upon
you, as if they would say, "Allah has placed us here to take care of
the confiding stranger." No ferocious demands for money fall upon my
ears; only an occasional suggestion is subtly conveyed to me that even
the poor must live and that I am immensely rich. An amiable, an almost
enticing seductiveness seems emanating from the fertile soil, shining
in the golden air, gleaming softly in the amber sands, dimpling in the
brown, the mauve, the silver eddies of the Nile. It steals upon one.
It ripples over one. It laps one as if with warm and scented waves. A
sort of lustrous languor overtakes one. In physical well-being one
sinks down, and with wide eyes one gazes and listens and enjoys, and
thinks not of the morrow.
The dahabiyeh - her very name, the /Loulia/, has a gentle, seductive,
cooing sound - drifts broadside to the current with furled sails, or
glides smoothly on before an amiable north wind with sails unfurled.
Upon the bloomy banks, rich brown in color, the brown men stoop and
straighten themselves, and stoop again, and sing. The sun gleams on
their copper skins, which look polished and metallic. Crouched in his
net behind the drowsy oxen, the little boy circles the livelong day
with the sakieh.
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