Slowly but surely, however, the hard-won miles go by. Sometimes the barren desert hems us in to right and left, with never a blade of green between the rock and the river. Sometimes, as at Tosko,[153] we come upon an open tract, where there are palms and castor-berry plantations and corn-fields alive with quail. The idle man goes ashore at Tosko with his gun, while the little lady and the writer climb a solitary rock about two hundred feet above the river. The bank shelves here, and a crescent-like wave of inundation, about three miles in length, overflows it every season. From this height one sees exactly how far the wave goes, and how it must make a little bay when it is there. Now it is a bay of barley, full to the brim, and rippling to the breeze. Beyond the green comes the desert; the one defined against the other as sharply as water against land. The desert looks wonderfully old beside the young green of the corn, and the Nile flows wide among sand-banks, like a tidal river near the sea. The village, squared off in parallelograms like a cattle market, lies mapped out below. A field-glass shows that the houses are simply cloistered court-yards roofed with palm-thatch; the sheik’s house being larger than the rest, with the usual open space and spreading sycamore in front. There are women moving to and fro in the court-yards, and husbandmen in the castor-berry patches. A funeral with a train of wailers goes out presently toward the burial-ground on the edge of the desert. The idle man, a slight figure with a veil twisted round his hat, wades, half-hidden, through the barley, signaling his whereabouts every now and then by a puff of white smoke. A cargo-boat, stripped and shorn, comes floating down the river, making no visible progress. A native felucca, carrying one tattered brown sail, goes swiftly up with the wind at a pace that will bring her to Abou Simbel before nightfall. Already she is past the village; and those black specks yonder, which we had never dreamed were crocodiles, have slipped off into the water at her approach. And now she is far in the distance--that glowing, illimitable distance--traversed by long silvery reaches of river, and ending in a vast flat, so blue and aerial that, but for some three or four notches of purple peaks on the horizon, one could scarcely discern the point at which land and sky melt into each other. Ibrim comes next; then Derr; then Wady Sabooyah. At Ibrim, as at Derr, there are “fair” families, whose hideous light hair and blue eyes (grafted on brown-black skins) date back to Bosnian forefathers of three hundred and sixty years ago. These people give themselves airs, and are the _haute noblesse_ of the place. The men are lazy and quarrelsome. The women trail longer robes, wear more beads and rings, and are altogether more unattractive and castor-oily than any we have seen elsewhere. They keep slaves, too. We saw these unfortunates trotting at the heels of their mistresses, like dogs.