The stately camel round doth go,
With gentle hesitating tread;
And yoked, and blind with frontlets, made
Of black Nile mud, the buffalo
Plies with him his unequal trade.

--Canon Rawnsley.

A large Dahabeah with rugs, easy chairs, and piano on deck, and the
stars and stripes hanging listlessly overhead, floated by, propelled by
fourteen Arab rowers--there being no wind to fill the sails. A drove of
gray buffaloes, forty in number, were taking their bath, splashing the
water like a party of schoolboys in a swimming pool. A group of women
filled earthen jars at the water's edge, and with the dripping jars on
their heads mounted the steep river bank. Here and there were irregular
groups of mud huts, intersected by crooked alleys and surrounded by date
palms, little villages where doves were flying overhead and from which
came the sound of barking dogs to mingle with the puffs of the steamer.
Flat-bottomed boats freighted with sugar cane lay with drooping sails in
a noonday calm, or, later in the day, sped before the evening breeze.
Near the pottery towns the river banks were dotted with yellow water
jars in scattered piles ready for shipment to the city market. Immense
stacks of the sugar-cane just harvested had been brought to the shore
for conveyance to the sugar factories. And fields of cotton covered with
white bloom extended into the distance.

We could see, too, the fertile Nile valley, not more than ten miles in
breadth at its widest part, bounded on both sides by ranges of yellow,
barren cliffs. On the western side the cliffs were farthest away; on the
eastern side the valley was narrow, and the cliffs were sometimes
distant, sometimes so near that they completely crowded out the
cultivable soil and approached to the water's edge.

"There is something peculiar in the air of this dry land," observed one
of the tourists after sitting quiet awhile. "The atmosphere lends a
softness to the outlines of distant objects and adds delicate tints in
the afternoon light. See how the barren cliffs are glorified with a
flush of pink, the wheat fields are a brilliant green, and the barley
fields, almost ready for the harvest, are golden. Even the mud huts and
the white-washed mosque of that village on the western shore have lost
their crude outlines and have become picturesque. At sunset the western
sky will change to crimson and the eastern cliffs will change to gold.
The sunsets, though, are not so gor