the castanets, and with the pure pride of power, advanced upon the floor, and danced incredibly. Crouching, before, like a wasted old willow, that merely shakes its drooping leaves to the tempestshe now shook her fibres with the vigor of a nascent elm, and moved up and down the room with a miraculous command of her frame.

In Venice, I had heard a gray gondolier, dwindled into a ferryman, awakened in a moonlighted midnight, as we swept by, with singers chanting Tasso, pour his swan-song of magnificent memory into the quick ear of night.

In the Champs Elysées, I had heard a rheumyeyed Invalide cry, with the sonorous enthusiasm of Austerlitz, "Vive Napoléon!" as a new Napoléon rode by.

It was the Indian summer goldening the white winter-the Zodiacal light far flashing day into the twilight. And here was the same in dead old Egypt-in a Ghazeeyah who had brimmed her beaker with the threescore and ten drops of life. Not more strange, and unreal, and impressive in their way, the inscrutable remains of Egypt, sandshrouded, but undecayed, than in hers, this strange spectacle of an efficient Coryphée of seventy.

Old Hecate! thou wast pure pomegranate also, and not banana, wonder most wonderful of all

words which must remain hieroglyphics upon these pages-and whose explication must be sought in Egypt, as they must come hither who would realize the freshness of Karnak.

Slow, sweet, singing followed. The refrain was plaintive, like those of the boat songs-soothing, after the excitement of the dancing, as nursery lays to children after a tired day. "Buono," Kushuk Arnem! last of the Arnems; for so her name signified. Was it a remembering refrain of Palestine, whose daughter you are? Taib," dove Xenobi ! Fated, shall I say, or favored? Pledged life-long to pleasure! Who would dare to be? Who but a child so careless would dream that these placid ripples of youth will rock you stormless to El Dorado?

66

O Allah! and who cares? Refill the amber nargileh, Xenobi-another fingan of mellow mocha Yet another strain more stirring. Hence, Hecate ! shrivel into invisibility with the thundering tár, and the old husband with his diabolical rabáb. Waits not the one-eyed first officer below, with a linen lantern, to pilot us to the boat? And the beak of the Ibis points it not to Syene, Nubia, and a world unknown? Farewell, Kushuk! Addio, still-eyed dove! Almost thou persuadest me to pleasure.

O Wallstreet, Wall-street! because you are virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale ?

XXI.

SAKIAS

WE departed at dawn. Before a gentle gale the Ibis fleetly flew, in the starlight, serenaded by the sakias.

These endless sighing sakias! There are fifty thousand of them in Egypt, or were, when Grandfather Mehemet was. They required a hundred and fifty thousand oxen to work them. But the murrain swept away the cattle, and now the Nile shores are strewn with the falling mud walls of sakias, ruins of the last great Egyptian reign. Like huge summer insects, they doze upon the bank, droning a melancholy, monotonous song. The slow, sad sound pervades the land-one calls to another, and he sighs to his neighbor, and the Nile is shored with sound no less than sand. Their chorus is the swan-song of Egypt. For Egypt is effete. The race is more ruined than the temples. Nor shall there be a resurrection of an exhausted people, until fading roses, buried in the ground,

take root again, or Memnon calls musically once more, down the far glad valley of the Nile.

The sakia is the great instrument of irrigation. It is a rude contrivance of two perpendicular wheels, turned by a horizontal cog. The outer wheel is girdled with a string of earthen jars, which descend with every revolution into the pit open to the river, in which the wheel turns. As the jars ascend, they empty themselves into a trough, thence conducted away, or directly into a channel of earth; and the water flowing into the fields, by little canals, invests each separate small square patch. There are no fences, and the valley of the Nile is divided into endless inclosures by these shallow canals. The surface of the country is regularly veined, and the larger channels are the arteries fed by the great sakia heart. Overflowing or falling, the Nile is forever nourishing Egypt, and far forth-looking from the propylons of temples, you may see the land checkered with slight silver streaks-tokens of its fealty and the Nile's devotion.

The sakia is worked by a pair of oxen. Upon the tongue of the crank which they turn, sits a boy, drowsing and droning, and beating their tail-region all day long. Nor is the sad creak of the wheel ever soothed by any unctuous matter, which the proprietor appropriates to his own proper person,

and which would also destroy the cherished creek So sit the boys along the Nile, among the cotton, tobacco, corn, beans, or whatever other crop, and by beating the tail-region of many oxen, cause the melancholy music of the river. It has infinite variety, but a mournful monotony of effect. Some sakias are sharp and shrill; they almost shriek in the tranced stillness. These you may know for the youth—these are the gibes of greenness. But sedater creaks follow. A plaintive monotony of moan that is helpless and hopeless. This is the general sakia sigh. It is as if the air simmered into sound upon the shore. It is the overtaxed labor of the land complaining, a slave's plaining-low, and lorn, and lifeless. Yet, as the summer seems not truly summer, until the locusts wind their dozy reeds, so Egypt seems not truly Egypt, except when the water-wheels sadden the silence. It is the audible weaving of the spell. The stillness were not so still without it, nor the temples so antique, nor the whole land so solitary and dead.

In books I read that it is the Ranz des Vaches of the Féllaheen, and that away from the Nile they sigh for the sakia, as it sighs with them at home. And truly, no picture of the river would be perfect that had not the water-wheels upon the shore. They abound in Nubia, and are there taxed heavily