The tall gyassas partly comforted Perry for the noisy bustle of the Alexandrian wharves, but his content was complete when, as the train turned to the southward, he saw in the distance a camel outlined against the sky-line. He felt that at last he really was in Egypt. The train was bowling along rapidly over the outer stretches of the Delta and its alternate patches of desert, marsh and cotton field, with a few mud huts here and there, when, even above the clatter of the train, there came a hideous squeaking rattle. “What in the wide world is that racket!” he ejaculated. “Probably a sakiyeh,” was the reply. “What’s a sakiyeh?” “An old water-wheel. You’ll see it in a second.” Then, a moment later, his friend added, “I thought so,” and pointed to where a fellah, or laborer, in his blue galabeah—which Perry inelegantly declared to be a nightshirt—stood beside the creaking water-wheel while a water-buffalo toilsomely trod round to raise the water to irrigate the land. The fellah looked up as the train sped by, and thus Perry caught his first glimpse of peasant labor. “When Joseph was sold by his brethren into Egypt,” remarked Antoine, “he probably saw sakiyehs being worked just that way. Very little has changed since.” “And those mud huts?” “The Children of Israel made bricks without straw,” the other reminded him. “Bricks are only baked mud.” Perry stared out of the window, thinking. What the professor had said, came back to him—“blaze-marks along the trail to civilization.” That was the trick of Egypt. The landscape was flat and uninteresting. As the train sped on, there was less desert and less marsh, the cultivated cotton fields grew thicker, there were more mud huts. Here and there a cluster of huts centered around a small mosque, with its graceful minaret. Occasionally small structures—which Antoine told him were saints’ tombs—broke the level, but aside from these, the lands of the Nile delta were level and monotonous. Yet, in spite of all, they were curiously vibrating, and after a while Perry realized that this was due to the sun, which flooded the country with a light so intense that it seemed brighter than sunlight. The train roared across a sluggish stream, with a gyassa in full sail upon it. “The Rosetta branch of the Nile,” said Antoine. Perry had nothing to say. It was not the picture he had formed in his mind of the Nile, but there was something about it, something incalculably old, as though the river were very aged and had fallen asleep. On the other side of the Rosetta branch, all the land was under cultivation. Cotton-cleaning mills, dotted here and there, took away even the quiet romance of the first part of the journey, and Perry was glad when at Bulak they crossed the Nile proper and the train sped swiftly on its way to Cairo.