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Updated: June 25, 2025
It was the very picture of what I'd read about an army in camp lines of tents and a crowd of men all spread out over a bit of land hardly big enough for a flock of sheep. Now and then a dog would bark now a revolver would go off. It was never quiet on Turon diggings, day or night. Well, there they all were, tents and diggers, claims and windlasses, pumps and water-wheels.
It is certain that the ancient Egyptians knew nothing as to the source of their great water-supply, their knowledge being limited to the combined river which begins at Khartūm, and for 1,750 miles flows uninterruptedly, and, with the exception of the River Atbara, without further tributaries until it reaches the sea; and it is curious to think that for every one of these 1,750 miles the Nile is a slowly diminishing stream, water-wheels, steam-pumps, and huge arterial canals distributing its water in all directions over the land.
Unseen water-wheels splashed coolly; vivid butterflies flickered through masses of greenery among the acacia, mimosa, lote and mulberry trees.
A little to the left was the narrow gorge through which one of the streams discharged, its bottom studded with ponds and mills, and its sharp sides flecked with the little white-painted homes of well-to-do operatives; to the right and left along the other branch and the course of the united streams, the rumble of water-wheels, the puff of laboring engines, and the groan of tortured machinery never ceased.
The large and bustling family of the sawyers, both top and bottom, he has utterly banished from their ancient haunts. 'There would be needed a million and a half of them to take the places of 11,199 steam-engines, of 314,774 horse-power, that are devastating our forests. An equal number is replaced by the 16,559 water-wheels, of 326,728 horse-power, engaged in the same field of havoc.
But I was not lonely; the drive up Talcott Mountain, under the rude portcullis of the toll-gate, through fragrant woods, by trickling brooks, past huge boulders that scarce a wild vine dare cling to, with its feeble, delicate tendrils, is all exquisite, and full of living repose; and turning to descend the mountain, just where a brook drops headlong with clattering leap into a steep black ravine, and comes out over a tiny green meadow, sliding past great granite rocks, and bending the grass-blades to a shining track, you see suddenly at your feet the beautiful mountain valley of the Farmington river, trending away in hill after hill, rough granite ledges crowned with cedar and pine, deep ravines full of heaped rocks, and here and there the formal white rows of a manufacturing village, where Kühleborn is captured and forced to turn water-wheels, and Undine picks cotton or grinds hardware, dammed into utility.
Sometimes I think I'll have a balloon and go up in the air; and sometimes I think I'll have ever so many books; and sometimes I think I'll have ever so many weathercocks and water-wheels; or have a machine like that one you and Colonel Sellers bought; and sometimes I think I'll have well, somehow I don't know somehow I ain't certain; maybe I'll get a steamboat first."
Neither do we find any trace of water-wheels, such as are employed upon the Orontes and other swift rivers, whereby a stream can itself be made to raise water from the land along its bunks. According to Herodotus, the kinds of grain cultivated in Assyria in his time were wheat, barley, sesame, and millet.
The Nile is exquisitely monotonous. He was coming under its spell. Far off and near, from the western and eastern banks of the river, he heard almost perpetually the creaking song of the sakeeyas, the water-wheels turned by oxen. They made the leit motiv of this wonderful, idle life.
In long rambles, afoot or on horseback, by day and night, he flung himself, for the resettling of his sanity, on the cheerful influences of their simple imagery; the hawks, as if asleep on the air below him; the bleached crags, evoked by late sunset among the dark oaks; the water-wheels, with their pleasant murmur, in the foldings of the hillside.
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