Читать книгу By-ways on Service: Notes from an Australian Journal онлайн

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But the journey revives you. How deliciously it revives you!—and how generously! as you skim across that green delta, sleeping under the dew, with the mist-wreaths winding about the quiet palm-fronds. The sweet-water canal runs silently beside you all the way between its clover-grown tow-paths, without a ripple. The buffalo stand motionless in the lush berseem. The Egyptian State railways are the smoothest in the world. Two hours' swift gliding through these early-morning haunts of quietness retrieves your loss of sleep, and would reinforce you for a day in any city.

As you approach Cairo you find the delta has wakened. The mists have departed, disclosing the acres of colour in the blossom of the crops. The road beside the Canal is peopled. The fellaheen and his family are moving along to work on donkey and buffalo and camel. The women in their black robes and yashmaks are moving to the dipping-places in the Canal, pitcher on head, walking with a grace and erectness that does you good to look on. Some are already drawing, knee-deep in the cool water; or emerging, and showing to the world, below the freely raised robe, that of whose outline they have no call to be ashamed. Some of the labourers are already at work, hoeing in squads under an overseer or guiding the primitive Vergilian plough behind its yoke of oxen. The blindfold yak has started his weary, interminable round at the water-wheel. The camels are looping along with their burdens of fruit and berseem, and the tiny donkeys amble under their disproportionate loads, sweeping the ground; they are hardly to be seen; in the distance they show merely a jogging hillock of green. By nine o'clock, as you race through the outskirts of Cairo, you see an occasional waiting man asleep full-stretch on the sod; the hour is early for sleeping. On the suburban roads are moving towards the centre venerable sheikhs, squat on the haunches of their well-groomed donkeys; merchants lying back in their elaborate gharries; gabbling peasants driving their little company of beasts; English and French officials, carefully dressed, smoking the morning cigarette.