In November, therefore, the visitor to Cairo can still get some idea of what Upper Egypt is like in flood-time. From desert to desert it stretches, one vast lake, divided by a network of dykes, and studded here and there with villages raised on artificial mounds, which year by year rise higher on their own ruins. A greater flood than usual makes terrible havoc in these villages; for the rising water soon crumbles their mud walls, and the whole collapses like a pack of cards. Every mortal thing is living on the dykes, which play the part of roads; only the water-fowl, emerging in thousands from their secluded marshes, spread themselves in security over the wide waters, and here and there an isolated villager may be seen in an ancient palm-wood tub, paddling and baling by turns. The dykes run on the same lines as they have run for centuries, and on them the traveller, on his way to visit the Pyramids of Gizeh or the Tombs of the Kings at Sakkarah, the burial-ground of ancient Memphis, may watch the whole life of Egypt pass and repass in long procession, set as in a frieze. Work in the fields, of course, is at a standstill, but the villages are humming with preparation for the sowing, and alive with flocks of goats and sheep, camels, buffaloes, and asses; even the rats have been forced to the same refuge, and may be seen popping in and out among the roots of the palm-trees.[4] Where one basin drains into another the fisherman spreads his net, and reaps a rich harvest in the rush of the current. At intervals are stationed pickets of grave watchers, squatting patiently alongside large bundles of millet or maize stalks. This is all that remains of the corvée service, and gladly is it borne. For every villager is interested in the preservation of the dykes, and apart from ordinary accidents this great lake, owing to the swift changes of temperature in the neighbouring desert, is liable to violent storms, which drive great waves against the crumbling dykes, and would soon break them if left alone. The millet stalks are put down to break the force of the waves. Each village omdeh, or headman, is responsible for these arrangements, and he, too, may be met upon the dykes, a picturesque figure in flowing black and white, mounted on an ambling Arab pony, going round to see that all his sentinels are on duty. How near the past is brought, when you enter the tombs and find painted on the walls, or figured out in stone, the same people engaged in the same pursuits, as though Egypt had not been since then for thousands of centuries coveted and seized in turn by so many invading nations! The cultivator of the soil, moulded by the unchanging and imperious demands of the great river, to which he owes his whole subsistence, has retained the customs, and even the features, of those remote forerunners, who are his ancestors in everything, except, perhaps, by descent of blood.