At a point about ten miles below Denderah we saw some thousands of fellâheen at work amid clouds of sand upon the embankments of a new canal. They swarmed over the mounds like ants, and the continuous murmur of their voices came to us across the river like the humming of innumerable bees. Others, following the path along the bank, were pouring toward the spot in an unbroken stream. The Nile must here be nearly half a mile in breadth; but the engineers in European dress and the overseers with long sticks in their hands were plainly distinguishable by the help of a glass. The tents in which these officials were camping out during the progress of the work gleamed white among the palms by the river side. Such scenes must have been common enough in the old days when a conquering Pharaoh, returning from Libya or the land of Kush, set his captives to raise a dyke, or excavate a lake, or quarry a mountain. The Israelites, building the massive walls of Pithom and Rameses with bricks of their own making, must have presented exactly such a spectacle. That we were witnessing a case of forced labor could not be doubted. Those thousands yonder had most certainly been drafted off in gangs from hundreds of distant villages, and were but little better off, for the time being, than the captives of the ancient empire. In all cases of forced labor under the present _régime_, however, it seems that the laborer is paid, though very insufficiently, for his unwilling toil; and that his captivity only lasts so long as the work for which he has been pressed remains in progress. In some cases the term of service is limited to three or four months, at the end of which time the men are supposed to be returned in barges towed by government steam-tugs. It too often happens, nevertheless, that the poor souls are left to get back how they can; and thus many a husband and father either perishes by the way or is driven to take service in some village far from home. Meanwhile his wife and children, being scantily supported by the Sheik el Beled, fall into a condition of semi-serfdom; and his little patch of ground, left untilled through seed-time and harvest, passes after the next inundation into the hands of a stranger.