Towards Evening We Arrived At The Town Of Atfeh - Half Land, Half Houses, Half Palm-Trees, With Swarms Of Half-Naked People Crowding The Rustic Shady Bazaars, And Bartering Their Produce Of Fruit Or Many-Coloured Grain.

Here the canal came to a check, ending abruptly with a large lock.

A little fleet of masts and country ships were beyond the lock, and it led into THE NILE.

After all, it is something to have seen these red waters. It is only low green banks, mud-huts, and palm-clumps, with the sun setting red behind them, and the great, dull, sinuous river flashing here and there in the light. But it is the Nile, the old Saturn of a stream - a divinity yet, though younger river-gods have deposed him. Hail! O venerable father of crocodiles! We were all lost in sentiments of the profoundest awe and respect; which we proved by tumbling down into the cabin of the Nile steamer that was waiting to receive us, and fighting and cheating for sleeping- berths.

At dawn in the morning we were on deck; the character had not altered of the scenery about the river. Vast flat stretches of land were on either side, recovering from the subsiding inundations: near the mud villages, a country ship or two was roosting under the date-trees; the landscape everywhere stretching away level and lonely. In the sky in the east was a long streak of greenish light, which widened and rose until it grew to be of an opal colour, then orange; then, behold, the round red disc of the sun rose flaming up above the horizon.

Enter page number Go  Previous Next
Page 199 of 240
Words from 54416 to 54690 of 65663