Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/197

one of those ancient water-wheels turned by a bullock, which are almost as familiar to the traveller on the Nile as the shadûf itself, and which, with their long complaining note — often heard far into the night-watches when the river is falling and time is becoming precious to those who still need water for their lands—might well sound to a fanciful imagination like the secular moan of this patient race of eternal toilers under eternal taskmasters, echoing through the ages. It was on the labourer at the sakkiyeh that the Dervishes first lighted as they came down the hill, and whether in mere wantonness of blood-lust or from fear lest he should give the alarm they shot the poor wretch dead beside his water-wheel. The two ideal archetypes of predatory barbarism and of peaceful industry could hardly have come into more dramatic conflict, or have acted and suffered more exactly after their kind. It was the history of Egypt in little—an epitome of the everlasting fate of its timid and defenceless