try of the roses," and they say that
everything grows there. The fellah thinks of it as of a Paradise where
man can only be happy. Every Egyptian who has ever set the butt end of a
gun against his shoulder sighs to be among its multitudinous game. The
fisherman longs to let down his net into the depths of its sacred lake.
The land-owner would rather have a few acres between Sennoures and Beni
Suwef than many in the other parts of Egypt. The man who is amorous
yearns after the legendary beauty of its unveiled women, with their
delicately tattooed chins, their huge eyes, and their slim and sinuous
bodies. And scarcely is there upon the Nile a brown boy whose face will
not gleam and grow expressive with desire at the sound of the words
"El-Fayyum."

It is a land of Goshen, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of
the heart's desire, this green tract of sweet and gracious fertility to
which the Bahr-Yusuf is kind.

But to Mrs. Armine it was from the very first a hateful land.

Their camp was pitched on a piece of brown waste ground, close to a
runlet of water, near a palm-grove that shut out from them the native
houses of the great village or country town of Sennoures. The land which
Nigel's fellahin were reclaiming and had reclaimed--for much of it was
already green with luxuriant crops--was farther away, where the oasis
runs flush with the pale yellow, or honey-coloured, or sometimes
spectral grey sands of the desert of Libya. But Nigel, when he first
came to the Fayyum, had first gone into camp among the palms of
Sennoures, and there had heard the Egyptian Pan in the night; and he
wanted to renew certain impressions, to feel them decked out, as it
were, with novel graces now that he was no longer lonely; so he had
ordered the camp to be pitched by the little stream that he knew, in
order to savour fully the great change in his life.

The railway from Cairo goes to Sennoures, so they came by train, and
arrived rather late in the afternoon. Three days later the Sacred Carpet
was to depart from Cairo on its journey to Mecca, and at
Madinat-al-Fayyum, and at other stations along the route, there were
throngs of natives assembled to bid farewell to the pilgrims who were
departing to accompany it and to worship at the Holy Places. Small and
cheap flags of red edged with a crude yellow fluttered over the doors or
beneath the hanging shutters of many dwellings, and the mild and limpid
atmosphere was full of the chanting