in obscurity; no doubt its present resignation comes from
lassitude, after so many centuries of effort and expansive power. Once
it monopolised the glory of the world, and here it is now--for some two
thousand years--fallen into a kind of tired sleep, which has left it an
easy prey alike to the conquerors of yesterday and to the exploiters of
to-day.

Another trait which, side by side with their patience, prevails amongst
these true-blooded Egyptians of the countryside is their attachment to
the soil, to the soil which nourishes them, and in which later on they
will sleep. To possess land, to forestall at any price the smallest
portion of it, to reclaim patches of it from the shifting desert, that
is the sole aim, or almost so, which the fellahs pursue in this world:
to possess a field, however small it may be--a field, moreover, which
they till with the oldest plough invented by man, the exact design of
which may be seen carved on the walls of the tombs at Memphis.

And this same people, which was the first of any to conceive
magnificence, whose gods and kings were formerly surrounded with an
over-powering splendour, contrives, to live to-day, pell-mell with its
sheep and goats, in humble, low-roofed cabins made out of sunbaked
mud! The Egyptian villages are all of the neutral colour of the soil;
a little white chalk brightens, perhaps, the minaret or cupola of the
mosque; but except for that little refuge, whither folk come to pray
each evening--for no one here would retire for the night without having
first prostrated himself before the majesty of Allah--everything is of
a mournful grey. Even the costumes of the people are dull-coloured and
wretched-looking. It is an East grown poor and old, although the sky
remains as wonderful as ever.

But all this past grandeur has left its imprint on the fellahs. They
have a refinement of appearance and manner, all unknown amongst the
majority of the good people of our villages. And those amongst them who
by good fortune become prosperous have forthwith a kind of distinction,
and seem to know, as if by birth, how to dispense the gracious
hospitality of an aristocrat. The hospitality of even the humblest
preserves something of courtesy and ease, which tells of breed. I
remember those clear evenings when, after the peaceful navigation of the
day, I used to stop and draw up my dahabiya to the bank of the river. (I
speak now of out-of-the-way places--free as yet from the canker of