Such a time as we had settling with those donkey-boys--the old white-turbaned sheik, owner of the donkeys, squatting and smoking indifferently while the storm raged about him. But it was over at last, and the boatmen sang again--a quiet afterlude of that extraordinary day--and collected baksheesh on the farther shore. XLII THE HIGHWAY OF EGYPT There could hardly be a daintier boat than the _Memnon_. It just holds our party; it is as clean and speckless as possible, and there is an open deck the full width of the tiny steamer, with pretty rugs and lazy chairs, where we may lounge and drowse and dream and look out on the gently passing panorama of the Nile. For we have left Luxor, and are floating in this peaceful fashion down to Cairo, resting in the delight of it, after those fierce temple-hunting, tomb-visiting days. Not that we are entirely through with temples and the like. Here and there we tie up to the bank, and go ashore and scamper away on donkeys to some tumbled ruin, but it is a diversion now, not a business, and we find such stops welcome. For the most part we spend our days just idling, and submitting to the spell of Egypt, which has encompassed us and possessed us as it will encompass and possess any one who has a trace of the old human tendency to drift and dream. It has been said of Boston that it is less a locality than a state of mind. I wish _I_ had said that--of Egypt. I will say it now, and without humor, for of this land it is so eminently true. A mere river-bank; a filament of green; a long slender lotus-stem, of which the Delta is the flower--_that_ is Egypt. Remote--shut in by the desert and the dead hills--it is far less a country and a habitation than a psychological condition which all the mummied ages have been preparing--which the traveller from the earliest moment is bound to feel. It has lived so long! It had made and recorded its history when the rest of the world was dealing in nursery-tales! The glamour of that stately past has become the spell, the enchantment of to-day. The magic of the lotus grows more potent with the years. It is such a narrow land! Sometimes the lifeless hills close in on one side or the other to the water's edge. Nowhere is the fertile strip wide, for its fertility depends wholly on the water it receives from the Nile, and when that water is drawn up by hand with a goat-skin pail and a well-sweep--a _shaduf_, as they call it--it means that fields cannot be very extensive, even if there were room, which as a rule there is not. [Illustration: THINK OF WATERING A WHOLE WHEAT-FIELD WITH A WELL-SWEEP AND A PAIL]