Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
The queen flushed and kissed the cheek. "Farewell, and peace go with thee," she said quietly. The princess retained her composure until she reentered the hall. There she flung her arms above her head and laughed silently. "Of a truth, I take peace with me, and I leave discord behind!" Shadoof a pole with a bucket attached, like the old well-sweep, used by rustics to dip water from the Nile.
Upon the Nile, you hear the creaking of the water-wheels, and sometimes the movement of steam-pumps, through the whole night, while the poorer cultivators unceasingly ply the simple shadoof, or bucket-and-sweep, laboriously raising the water from trough to trough by as many as six or seven stages when the river is low.
At all events a complete revolution in the management of land, and probably of its tenure, must precede the general use of machinery for this purpose. The "shadoof" of today is the same in form as that used by the ancient Egyptians.
The great door is a marvel of carving-work for Unyanyembe artisans. Each rafter within is also carved with fine designs. Before the front of the house is a young plantation of pomegranate trees, which flourish here as if they were indigenous to the soil. A shadoof, such as may be seen on the Nile, serves to draw water to irrigate the gardens.
I know something of the shadoof of Egypt, the same arrangement by which the sacred waters of the Nile have been lifted, from the days of the Pharaohs to those of the Khedives. That long forefinger pointing to heaven was a symbol which spoke to the Puritan exile as it spoke of old to the enslaved Israelite.
He is the same figure his ancestors were six thousand years ago, as represented on the tombs and temples of Thebes, and on the slabs of Gizeh in the Museum at Cairo. He still performs his work in the nineteenth century just as he did before the days of Moses, scattering the seed and working the shadoof. He is little seen in the cities; his place is in the field; there he lives and thrives.
I sailed up the Nile delightful journeys on board the Nile boats forgetting Miss Pinshon and mathematics, except when I rather pitied the ancient Egyptians for being so devoted to the latter; forgetting Magnolia, and all the home things I could not do and would have liked to do; forgetting everything, and rapt in the enjoyment of tropical airs, and Eastern skies; hearing the plash of water from the everlasting shadoof, and watching the tints and colours on the ranges of hills bordering the Nile valley.
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.
Not one of us but thrilled to the droning cry of the shadoof men on the brown banks, as the dripping water jars went up and up, tier after tier above the river level.
The crocodile does not attempt to swallow an animal at once, but having carried it to a favourite feeding-place, generally in some deep hole, it tears it limb from limb with teeth and claws and devours it at leisure. The camp of the "Forty Thieves" had been finished some time since: the gardens were flourishing, and I erected a "shadoof," or Egyptian double bucket and lever for irrigation.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking