Behind That Bright
Emerald Line Ran The Fawn-Or Tiger-Coloured Background Of Desert, And A
Pale Blue Sky Closed All.
There was Egypt even as the Pharaohs, their
engineers and architects, had seen it - land to cultivate, folk and
cattle for the work, and outside that work no distraction nor allurement
of any kind whatever, save when the dead were taken to their place
beyond the limits of cultivation.
When the banks grew lower, one looked
across as much as two miles of green-stuff packed like a toy Noah's-ark
with people, camels, sheep, goats, oxen, buffaloes, and an occasional
horse. The beasts stood as still, too, as the toys, because they were
tethered or hobbled each to his own half-circle of clover, and moved
forward when that was eaten. Only the very little kids were loose, and
these played on the flat mud roofs like kittens.
No wonder 'every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.' The
dusty, naked-footed field-tracks are cut down to the last centimetre of
grudged width; the main roads are lifted high on the flanks of the
canals, unless the permanent-way of some light railroad can be pressed
to do duty for them. The wheat, the pale ripened tufted sugar-cane, the
millet, the barley, the onions, the fringed castor-oil bushes jostle
each other for foothold, since the Desert will not give them room; and
men chase the falling Nile inch by inch, each dawn, with new furrowed
melon-beds on the still dripping mud-banks.
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