All hands being safe on board, we pushed off at once, leaving about a couple of hundred disconsolate dealers on the bank. A long-drawn howl of disappointment followed in our wake. Those who had sold, and those who had not sold, were alike wronged, ruined, and betrayed. One woman tore wildly along the bank, shrieking and beating her breast. Foremost among the sellers, she had parted from her gold brow-pendant for a good price; but was inconsolable now for the loss of it. It often happened that those who had been most eager to trade were readiest to repent of their bargains. Even so, however, their cupidity outweighed their love of finery. Moved once or twice by the lamentations of some dark damsel who had sold her necklace at a handsome profit, we offered to annul the purchase. But it invariably proved that, despite her tears, she preferred to keep the money. The palms of Derr and of the rich district beyond were the finest we saw throughout the journey. Straight and strong and magnificently plumed, they rose to an average height of seventy or eighty feet. These superb plantations supply all Egypt with saplings and contribute a heavy tax to the revenue. The fruit, sun-dried and shriveled, is also sent northward in large quantities. The trees are cultivated with strenuous industry by the natives and owe as much of their perfection to laborious irrigation as to climate. The foot of each separate palm is surrounded by a circular trench, into which the water is conducted by a small channel about fourteen inches in width. Every palm-grove stands in a network of these artificial runlets. The reservoir from which they are supplied is filled by means of a sakkieh, or water-wheel--a primitive and picturesque machine consisting of two wheels, the one set vertically to the river and slung with a chain of pots; the other a horizontal cog turned sometimes by a camel, but more frequently in Nubia by a buffalo. The pots (which go down empty, dip under the water, and come up full) feed a sloping trough which in some places supplies a reservoir, and in others communicates at once with the irrigating channels. These sakkiehs are kept perpetually going, and are set so close just above Derr, that the writer counted a line of fifteen within the space of a single mile. There were probably quite as many on the opposite bank.