United States or Iceland ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some of the cargoes carried by these Nile boats are worth describing, and large numbers are employed in carrying "tibbin" from the farms to the larger towns. "Tibbin" is the chopped straw upon which horses and cattle in the towns are mainly fed, and it is loaded on to the boats in a huge pyramidical pile carried upon planks which considerably overhang the boat's sides.
Perfect control not only on the railway system but in the forward supply yards prevented congestion, and when a train arrived at its destination and was split up into several parts, well-drilled gangs of troops and Egyptian labourers were allotted to each truck, and whether a lorry or a tractor had to be unshipped and moved down a ramp, or a truck had to be relieved of its ten tons of tibbin, boxes of biscuit and bully, or of engineers' stores, the goods were cleared away from the vicinity of the line with a celerity which a goods-yard foreman at home would have applauded as the smartest work he had ever seen.
Sacks of grain and bales of tibbin stood in huge pyramidal mounds; multitudinous rows of boxes containing bully-beef, condensed milk, dried fruit, biscuits, cocoa, and tea, seemed to stretch for miles. One walked down streets of bully-beef, as it were; loitered in squares bounded by biscuit-tins; dodged up alleys flanked by tea-chests and cases of "Ideal" milk.
The riders sprang off, and laid out the chopped tibbin upon cloths in front of them, for no well-bred camel will eat from the ground. In their gentle eyes, their quiet, leisurely way of eating, and their condescending, mincing manner, there was something both feminine and genteel, as though a party of prim old maids had foregathered in the heart of the Libyan Desert.
The steersman is placed upon the top of this stack, and is enabled to guide his vessel by a long pole lashed to the tiller, and it is curious to notice that the "tibbin," though finely chopped, does not appear to blow away.
In a few minutes the loads were unstrapped, the animals tethered, a fire lighted, fresh water carried up from the river, and each camel-boy provided with his own little heap of tibbin laid in the centre of the table-cloth, without which no well-bred Arabian will condescend to feed.
This did not fit them for an afternoon on a tropical day, so that, when the zealous officer came at five to view the completed work, he found only a collection of happy and sleepy warriors pleasantly reclining in the shade of a tibbin stack. Awful threats fell unheeded upon them, and the work remained undone.
Officers who were free to do so would return by the Egyptian State Railway west of the Canal, as far as Kantara, and then go up by the desert line to Romani, perched on a truck of tibbin a bumpy and smutty ride.
There is of course one missing; but the officer, being certain that he is either a mangled corpse among the mules, or far more probably triumphantly asleep on a stack of tibbin, declines to search for him, and the party steps out for home, are challenged by a pessimistic sentry, dismissed, and, stumbling over their recumbent comrades, find an unoccupied corner of their tents, and sleep the sleep of the just till réveillé and after, if possible.