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It was the time of low Nile when all the land is baked like a crust of bread, when the creaking of the shadoofs and the singing croak of the sakkia are heard the night long like untiring crickets with throats of frogs.
On the river-bank, also, interspersed with the shadoofs of the poorer class of agriculturists, the more prosperous farmers, who were the happy possessors of buffaloes or camels, lifted the irrigating water from the stream by means of sakiyehs, or wooden power wheels, which creaked unceasingly as the patient camels or buffaloes, with eyes covered by blinders of mud, trod round and round the wheel.
And aren't the sakkiyehs more interesting than the shadoofs, which they use mostly when the river is low? Willis said quite a lovely thing, about the sakkiyehs: that their chains of great water cups, going up and down, look like enormous strings of red and green prayer-beads, being 'told' by unseen hands. He ought to be a poet, he's so romantic."
It was hoped to cover the very large expenditure by the additional land which it was expected would come under irrigation, and by doing away with the primitive shadoofs and setting free for productive enterprise the numerous army of the agricultural labourers who spent the greater part of their time in slowly raising up buckets of water from the Nile and pouring them into the irrigating channels.
Perhaps the Canal Cavour, and other irrigating canals now proposed, may one day intercept as large a proportion of the supply of the lower Po as Egyptian dikes, canals, shadoofs, and steam-pumps do of that of the Nile. Another circumstance is important to be considered in comparing the character of these three rivers.
It was the time of low Nile when all the land is baked like a crust of bread, when the creaking of the shadoofs and the singing croak of the sakkia are heard the night long like untiring crickets with throats of frogs.
"Except when the light is different, or there's some green stuff for cattle growing on the banks, everything's the same yellow-brown; and nothing happens but palms and mud villages, and shadoofs, and a few Arabs, or camels, or those ugly water buffaloes they say the devil made, to show what he could do.
The operation is very quickly performed, and the bucket kept constantly going. It would be hard to beat these ancient Egyptian shadoofs by any device requiring human labor where the amount of water required is small. Water-wheels, driven by bullocks or cows, and sometimes by one animal only, are sometimes used.
On the bosom of the world's most mysterious river, the brown sails were gleaming like the wings of great birds, and inshore the graceful lateens under the dipping shadoofs were closely folded as they lay at rest. Over beyond Ghizeh loomed the Pyramids which she was to visit on the morrow, the Sphinx in its majesty between.
Not a drop of rain nor a single brook adds to its volume in all that distance, and a hot sun, canals, ditches, sakiyehs, shadoofs, and water carriers are continually taking away from it throughout every mile of its winding course. The river is wider here but it has less volume than one thousand miles farther up the stream.
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