The Same
Cultivation Proceeded On The Banks As In The Oldest Ages; The Same
Boats, With The Same Sails, Went Up And Down The Thread Of Water; The
Same Songs Kept Time To The Eternal Human Toil.
The race of fellahs,
the unconscious guardian of a prodigious past, slept on without desire
of change, and almost without suffering.
And time passed for Egypt in
a great peace of sunlight and of death.
But to-day the foreigners are masters here, and have wakened the old
Nile - wakened to enslave it. In less than twenty years they have
disfigured its valley, which until then had preserved itself like a
sanctuary. They have silenced its cataracts, captured its precious
water by dams, to pour it afar off on plains that are become like
marshes and already sully with their mists the crystal clearness of
the sky. The ancient rigging no longer suffices to water the land
under cultivation. Machines worked by steam, which draw the water more
quickly, commence to rise along the banks, side by side with new
factories. Soon there will scarcely be a river more dishonoured than
this, by iron chimneys and thick, black smoke. And it is happening
apace, this exploitation of the Nile - hastily, greedily, as in a hunt
for spoils. And thus all its beauty disappears, for its monotonous
course, through regions endless alike, won us only by its calm and its
old-world mystery.
Poor Nile of the prodigies! One feels sometimes still its departing
charm, stray corners of it remain intact.
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