The first fellahin villages seen on the right and left of the road impress one curiously. They are collections of huts of unbaked brick cemented with mud, with flat roofs occasionally topped with a sort of whitewashed turret for pigeons, the sloping walls of which faintly recall the outline of a truncated Egyptian pylon. A door as low as that of a tomb, and two or three holes pierced in the wall are the only openings in these huts, which look more like the work of termites than that of men. Often half the village--if such a name can be given to these earthen huts--has been washed away by the rains or sapped by the flood; but no great harm is done; with a few handfuls of mud the house is soon rebuilt, and five or six days of sunshine suffice to make it inhabitable. This description, scrupulously exact, does not give a very attractive idea of a fellahin village; but plant by the side of these cubes of gray earth a clump of date palms, have a camel or two kneel down in front of the doors, which look like the mouths of warrens, let a woman come out from one of them draped in her long blue gown, holding a child by the hand and bearing a jar of water on her head, light it all up with sunlight, and you have a charming and characteristic picture. The thing which strikes the most inattentive traveller as soon as he steps into this Lower Egypt, where from time immemorial the Nile has been accumulating its mud in thin layers, is the close intimacy of the fellah and the earth. Autochthone is the name that best fits him; he springs from the clay which he treads, he is made out of it, and scarce has emerged from it. He manipulates it, presses it as a child presses its nurse's breast, to draw from its brown bosom the milk of fertility. He sinks waist-deep into its fertile mud, drains it, waters it, dries it, according to its needs; cuts canals in it, builds up levees upon it, draws from it the clay with which he constructs his family dwelling and with which he will cement his tomb. Never was a respectful son more careful of his old mother; he does not leave her as do those vagabond children who forsake their natal roof in search of adventures. He remains there, always attentive to the least want of his antique ancestor, the black earth of Kame. If she thirsts, he gives her drink, if she is troubled by too much humidity, he dries it; in order not to wound her, he works her almost without tools, with his hands; his plough merely scratches the telluric skin, which the inundation covers each year with a new epidermis. As you watch him going and coming upon that soaking ground, you feel that he is in his element. In his blue garment, which resembles a pontiff's robe, he presides over the marriage of earth and water, he unites the two principles which, warmed by the sun, give birth to life. Nowhere is this harmony between man and the soil so visible; nowhere does the earth play so important a part. It imparts its colour to everything.