Remember you not the condition of the cultivator faced with the registering of the harvest tax, when the snake has carried off half the corn and the hippopotamus has devoured the rest? The mice abound in the fields. The locusts descend. The cattle devour. The sparrows bring disaster upon the cultivator. The remainder that is on the threshing floor is at an end, it falls to the thieves. The value of the hired cattle (?) is lost. The yoke of oxen has died while threshing and ploughing. And now the scribe lands on the river bank and is about to register the harvest tax. The janitors carry staves and the Nubians (policemen) rods of palm, and they say, “Hand over the corn,” though there is none. The cultivator is beaten all over, he is bound and thrown into the well, soused, and dipped head downwards. His wife has been bound in his presence, his children are in fetters. His neighbours abandon him and are fled.[151] If such brutality had been the rule, it is clear that Egyptian society could not have survived. Agriculturalists are inevitably the prey of occasional calamities because they are dependent on weather and water. But if disasters follow one another frequently without relief, or if oppression by those in power exceeds a certain limit, there is no inducement for the peasant to continue his labours at all. He takes to flight or to revolt. We have seen why the texts used in the scribal schools emphasized the shadow-side of the peasant’s lot. Moreover, we should remember that the humdrum normal life of the rural population offered no interest to the _literati_. The elementary satisfactions of a life wedded to nature, its crafty game of hiding assets from the bureaucrats, its tough endurance of injustice, the latent power of its indispensability—all these did not supply the scribal schools with material for the florid compositions which were their pride. It was otherwise with the sculptors and painters. These men, charged with depicting on the walls of the great tombs the various rural activities from which the sustenance of the owner, in the next world, as in this, derived,[152] rendered these with the liveliest interest. Their work (Figs. 29, 30) presents to us a gay, light-hearted people, resembling in many respects the modern fellahin who similarly live on the verge of poverty under hardship and oppression. In the tombs we see fishermen and herdsmen at their tasks, joking with one another (the words are sometimes rendered over their images). Harvesters move in a row, rhythmically swinging their sickles to the tune of a song which is accompanied by a man with a long reed pipe (Fig. 29).[153] Women bring food to their menfolk; two little girls squabble, while a third draws a thorn from the foot of her friend; a shepherd dozes under a tree, his dog asleep beside him (Fig. 30);[154] another herdsman refreshes himself from a goatskin bottle.