Egypt (La Mort de Philae) eBook

CHAPTER IX

THE RACE OF BRONZE

A monotonous chant on three notes, which must date
from the first Pharaohs, may still be heard in our
days on the banks of the Nile, from the Delta as far
as Nubia. At different places along the river,
half-made men, with torsos of bronze and voices all
alike, intone it in the morning when they commence
their endless labours and continue it throughout the
day, until the evening brings repose.

Whoever has journeyed in a dahabiya up the old river
will remember this song of the water-drawers, with
its accompaniment, in slow cadence, of creakings of
wet wood.

It is the song of the “shaduf,” and the
“shaduf” is a primitive rigging, which
has remained unchanged since times beyond all reckoning.
It is composed of a long antenna, like the yard of
a tartan, which is supported in see-saw fashion on
an upright beam, and carries at its extremity a wooden
bucket. A man, with movements of singular beauty,
works it while he sings, lowers the antenna, draws
the water from the river, and raises the filled bucket,
which another man catches in its ascent and empties
into a basin made out of the mud of the river bank.
When the river is low there are three such basins,
placed one above the other, as if they were stages
by which the precious water mounts to the fields of
corn and lucerne. And then three “shadufs,”
one above the other, creak together, lowering and
raising their great scarabaeus’ horns to the
rhythm of the same song.

All along the banks of the Nile this movement of the
antennae of the shadufs is to be seen. It had
its beginning in the earliest ages and is still the
characteristic manifestation of human life along the
river banks. It ceases only in the summer, when
the river, swollen by the rains of equatorial Africa,
overflows this land of Egypt, which it itself has
made in the midst of the Saharan sands. But in
the winter, which is here a time of luminous drought
and changeless blue skies, it is in full swing.
Then every day, from dawn until the evening prayer,
the men are busy at their water-drawing, transformed
for the time into tireless machines, with muscles
that work like metal bands. The action never
changes, any more than the song, and often their thoughts
must wander from their automatic toil, and lose themselves
in some dream, akin to that of their ancestors who
were yoked to the same rigging four or five thousands
years ago. Their torsos, deluged at each rising
of the overflowing bucket, stream constantly with
cold water; and sometimes the wind is icy, even while
the sun burns; but these perpetual workers are, as
we have said, of bronze, and their hardened bodies
take no harm.

These men are the fellahs, the peasants of the valley
of the Nile—­pure Egyptians, whose type
has not changed in the course of centuries. In
the oldest of the bas-reliefs of Thebes or Memphis
you may see many such, with the same noble profile
and thickish lips, the same elongated eyes shadowed
by heavy eyelids, the same slender figure, surmounted
by broad shoulders.