DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.14563#0086
60
EGYPT, PAST AND PRESENT.
Our cook boy, who is picking up a little English, seeing
me peering into a native hovel, said, " This, sleep the Arab."
And that is pretty much the whole story. An Arab's house
is the place for sleeping. He lives out of doors. Hence
the cares of a housewife are few. Yet the domestic attach-
ments of these poor people are very strong. Only the
" Upper Ten" of the cities practice polygamy. And
woman is happy in Egypt, even if she does nothing but
carry a water jar on her head, and a sore-eyed baby on her
shoulders, or in a basket on heiverown.
I was greatly amused one day, at seeing a little girl not
over four years old, strutting along-side of her mother with
a tiny water jar on her head, as if she were a new made
queen. I don't think "Women's Rights" could do any
thing in this generation toward taking off the burden from
the heads of their sisters in Egypt. The water jar is
rather the prerogative of womanhood.
Except during the season of the inundation of the Kile,
the land is watered wholly by artificial means. I never
could fully comprehend the practicability of this, till I saw
it done. For six hundred miles south of Cairo, Upper
Egypt is but a strip of alluvium some five or six miles wide,
deposited upon both sides of the Nile along the edge of two
deserts, or the bases of two parallel ranges of naked lime-
stone hills. In the high Nile the river overflows nearly the
whole of this, and adds to its richness the wash of the
Nubian mountains. For the rest of the year the land is
watered from the Nile by machines of various sorts. The
simplest and most common of these is the shadoof, which
consists of a pole swung between two upright timbers, and
having "a stone or a ball of mud at one end, and a bucket
of skin at the other. A little trench is cut from the river,
which feeds a pool below the level of the stream, and from
this, the water is clipped up by the bucket, and poured into
EGYPT, PAST AND PRESENT.
Our cook boy, who is picking up a little English, seeing
me peering into a native hovel, said, " This, sleep the Arab."
And that is pretty much the whole story. An Arab's house
is the place for sleeping. He lives out of doors. Hence
the cares of a housewife are few. Yet the domestic attach-
ments of these poor people are very strong. Only the
" Upper Ten" of the cities practice polygamy. And
woman is happy in Egypt, even if she does nothing but
carry a water jar on her head, and a sore-eyed baby on her
shoulders, or in a basket on heiverown.
I was greatly amused one day, at seeing a little girl not
over four years old, strutting along-side of her mother with
a tiny water jar on her head, as if she were a new made
queen. I don't think "Women's Rights" could do any
thing in this generation toward taking off the burden from
the heads of their sisters in Egypt. The water jar is
rather the prerogative of womanhood.
Except during the season of the inundation of the Kile,
the land is watered wholly by artificial means. I never
could fully comprehend the practicability of this, till I saw
it done. For six hundred miles south of Cairo, Upper
Egypt is but a strip of alluvium some five or six miles wide,
deposited upon both sides of the Nile along the edge of two
deserts, or the bases of two parallel ranges of naked lime-
stone hills. In the high Nile the river overflows nearly the
whole of this, and adds to its richness the wash of the
Nubian mountains. For the rest of the year the land is
watered from the Nile by machines of various sorts. The
simplest and most common of these is the shadoof, which
consists of a pole swung between two upright timbers, and
having "a stone or a ball of mud at one end, and a bucket
of skin at the other. A little trench is cut from the river,
which feeds a pool below the level of the stream, and from
this, the water is clipped up by the bucket, and poured into