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Now speaking, now rocking their bodies to and fro, in the evening sunlight, they sat and watched the Nile in flood covering the wide wastes of the Fayoum, spreading over the land rich deposits of earth from the mountains of Abyssinia.
And you shall say 'Go there, and they shall go, and 'Come here, and they shall come. For my soul is with you for Egypt, O friend of the fellah and saviour of the land. Have I not heard of the great reservoirs you would make in the Fayoum, of the great dam at Assouan? Have I not heard, and waited, and watched? and now . . ." He paused and touched his breast and his forehead in respect.
"Fayoum" means Country of the Lake it seems; and it really is a great emerald cup sunk below the level of the Nile as if to dip up water for its roses. However, the Set is happy despite the state of its clothes and its hair. None of us quite realized what the Fallahcen were really like before, or that the word Fellal meant "ploughman."
As he turned his course to the Nile, and crossed over the great bridge, there went clanking by in chains a hundred conscripts, torn from their homes in the Fayoum, bidding farewell for ever to their friends, receiving their last offerings, for they had no hope of return. He looked at their haggard and dusty faces, at their excoriated ankles, and his eyes closed in pain. All they felt he felt.
When the old adviser was taken out to see how well the work was done, he was so amazed that he exclaimed: "That would have been a mighty work for a thousand days," and it is called Fayoum to this day. Today the gardens and orchards of Fayoum are among the finest and most productive in all Egypt. No one can go over this land without walking in the footsteps of Moses, for Egypt was his playground.
But alas, the flood of gold and the rose-pink mist are composed of dust that reddish dust in which presumably the boasted Fayoum roses grow; and it blows into our noses. This upsets our tempers, and prevents our enjoying the pictures we see in the sudden transition from desert to oasis.
On the contrary, though he pretends not to notice camels, cows, or buffaloes, he whinnies and prances with delight when he meets anything of his own shape, and assumes hobby-horse attitudes, much to the alarm of Cleopatra and Miss Hassett-Bean. Also, just to remind everybody that sand is his element, he shies at water, and almost swoons at sight of the Fayoum light railway. Much wind again.
For four days he pursued it, without halting and in some danger, for, disguise himself as he would in his frequenting of the cafes, his Arabic was not yet wholly perfect. Sometimes he went about in European dress, and that was equally dangerous, for in those days the Fayoum was a nest of brigandage and murder, and an European an infidel dog was fair game.
Our best sunset; romance but slightly damaged by an Arab waiter wrapping up his head in a towel with which he had just dried our teacups and no doubt will again. We have just arrived, hot and dusty, with more dust of more Fayoum than we had before Lake Moeris.
John's Gospel have alike come down to us as the work of Nonnus, whose authorship of both learned men have never been able to deny, having regard to the similarity of style, but never could explain until the facts above narrated came to light in one of the Fayoum papyri recently acquired by the Archduke Rainer.
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