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She looked out of the window of their compartment at the green plains of doura, at the almost naked brown men bending rhythmically by the shadûfs, at the children passing on donkeys, and the women standing at gaze with corners of their dingy garments held fast between their teeth; and she felt as if she still saw the dark courts of Hathor's dwelling, as if she still heard the cries of the enormous bats that inhabit them.
As the river falls the basin can no longer be fed by the river, so a second "shadūf" is erected in order to keep the first supplied, and in low Nile it is quite a common sight to see four of these "shadūfs," one above the other, employed in raising the water from the river-level to the high bank above.
"The land," writes Herodotus , who saw it in its prime, "has a little rain, and this nourishes the corn at the root; but the crops are matured and brought to harvest by water from the river not, as in Egypt, by the river flooding over the fields, but by human labour and shadufs For Babylonia, like Egypt, is one network of canals, the largest of which is navigable.
A few pints of muddy water raised by a weight, half of it falling out of the badly constructed basin as it goes, and the same drop of water handled again and again by four men till the tiny trickle reaches the fields! We watch with amazement. The shrieking and squeaking of the shadufs goes on, the brown figures stoop down, rise again, and swing with regularity, minute after minute.
All along the banks of the Nile this movement of the antennae of the shadufs is to be seen. It had its beginning in the earliest ages and is still the characteristic manifestation of human life along the river banks. It ceases only in the summer, when the river, swollen by the rains of equatorial Africa, overflows this land of Egypt, which it itself has made in the midst of the Saharan sands.
From the near bank, mingling with the loud and nasal song of the Nubian sailors, rose the fierce and almost tragic songs of the fellahîn working the shadûfs. How many kinds of lives there were in the world! The blow that had fallen upon Mrs.
At the water's edge herds of buffaloes wallow in the river, tended by a little boy who stares stolidly at your steamer as it passes or, in great excitement, chases your vessel and vainly cries for "backshish." At frequent intervals are the water-wheels and "shadūfs," which raise the water to the level of the fields, and these are such important adjuncts of the farm that I must describe them.
And then the buffaloes, massive and mud-coloured, who descend calmly to bathe. And, finally, the great labour of the watering: the traditional noria, turned by a little bull with bandaged eyes and, above all, the shaduf, worked by men whose naked bodies stream with the cold water. The shadufs follow one another sometimes as far as the eye can see.
Who wouldn't be a fellah rather than a toiler in any English town? Here are the shadûfs!
When the river is low there are three such basins, placed one above the other, as if they were stages by which the precious water mounts to the fields of corn and lucerne. And then three "shadufs," one above the other, creak together, lowering and raising their great scarabaeus' horns to the rhythm of the same song.
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