Poor, Beautiful People, With Muscles That
Never Grow Tired!
Whose men in olden times moved the great stones of
the temples, and knew no burden that was too heavy; whose women, with
their slender, pale-tawny arms and delicate small hands, surpass by
far in strength the burliest of our peasants!
Poor beautiful race of
bronze! No doubt it was too precocious and put forth too soon its
astonishing flower - in times when the other peoples of the earth were
till vegetating in obscurity; no doubt its present resignation comes
from lassitude, after so many centuries of effort and expansive power.
Once it monopolised the glory of the world, and here it is now - for
some two thousand years - fallen into a kind of tired sleep, which has
left it an easy prey alike to the conquerors of yesterday and to the
exploiters of to-day.
Another trait which, side by side with their patience, prevails
amongst these true-blooded Egyptians of the countryside is their
attachment to the soil, to the soil which nourishes them, and in which
later on they will sleep. To possess land, to forestall at any price
the smallest portion of it, to reclaim patches of it from the shifting
desert, that is the sole aim, or almost so, which the fellahs pursue
in this world: to possess a field, however small it may be - a field,
moreover, which they till with the oldest plough invented by man, the
exact design of which may be seen carved on the walls of the tombs at
Memphis.
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