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Let him have his fill of them!" A woman snatched an orange from the nearest tree, and flung it full in his face. He opened his mouth to remonstrate, but another orange stopped it on the instant. With a fearful oath he gave up the argument, and ran for his life, amid a roar of laughter. Then Iskender came out upon the pathway, and walked along it till he reached the sakieh.
The sakieh droned in my ears no more like distant Sicilian pipes playing at Natale. I felt a breath from the desert. And, indeed, the desert was near that realistic desert which suggests to the traveller approaches to the sea, so that beyond each pallid dune, as he draws near it, he half expects to hear the lapping of the waves.
On a carpet spread in the shade which fringed some open ground beside the sakieh, Elias and the Frank reclined at ease. Within hand's reach of them was placed a heap of oranges and sweet lemons, representing every variety which the garden produced; and between them reposed a tray on which were seen the remains of a choice repast.
And the sakieh raises its wailing, wayward voice and sings to the shadoof; and the shadoof sings to the sakieh; and the lifted water falls and flows away into the green wilderness of doura that, like a miniature forest, spreads on every hand to the low mountains, which do not perturb the spirit, as do the iron mountains of Algeria.
The primitive shadoof of native origin figured on a monument as far back as 3,300 years ago, and the more modern sakieh was apparently introduced in later times from Syria and Persia. The shadoof is used on small farms, and the sakieh is more often used for larger farms and plantations. These contrivances line the whole course of the Nile from Lower Egypt to above Khartum.
The sakieh, which will raise twelve hundred gallons twenty or twenty-four feet in an hour, is a modified form of a Persian wheel, made to revolve by a beast of burden; it draws an endless series of buckets up from the water, and automatically empties them into a trough or other receptacle.
Upon the bloomy banks, rich brown in color, the brown men stoop and straighten themselves, and stoop again, and sing. The sun gleams on their copper skins, which look polished and metallic. Crouched in his net behind the drowsy oxen, the little boy circles the livelong day with the sakieh.
He said, "That's all right," and gave his hand to Iskender, who all at once beheld the beauty of the trees and sky, the wealth of crimson flowers above the sakieh. But when the suppliant pressed it to his lips, the Frank seemed angry, cried, "Don't be idiotic!" and glanced round him nervously. "I luf you, sir!" pursued Iskender passionately. "By God, I neffer tell you lies again.
River, green plains, yellow plains, pink, brown, steel-grey, or pale-yellow mountains, wail of shadoof, wail of sakieh. Yes, I suppose there is a sameness, a sort of golden monotony, in this land pervaded with light and pervaded with sound.
The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes these will not trouble themselves about your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger of the heart and the imagination. Yet Egypt is not unresponsive.
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