creakings of wet wood.

It is the song of the "shaduf," and the "shaduf" is a primitive rigging,
which has remained unchanged since times beyond all reckoning. It
is composed of a long antenna, like the yard of a tartan, which is
supported in see-saw fashion on an upright beam, and carries at its
extremity a wooden bucket. A man, with movements of singular beauty,
works it while he sings, lowers the antenna, draws the water from the
river, and raises the filled bucket, which another man catches in its
ascent and empties into a basin made out of the mud of the river bank.
When the river is low there are three such basins, placed one above the
other, as if they were stages by which the precious water mounts to
the fields of corn and lucerne. And then three "shadufs," one above
the other, creak together, lowering and raising their great scarabaeus'
horns to the rhythm of the same song.

All along the banks of the Nile this movement of the antennae of the
shadufs is to be seen. It had its beginning in the earliest ages and
is still the characteristic manifestation of human life along the river
banks. It ceases only in the summer, when the river, swollen by the
rains of equatorial Africa, overflows this land of Egypt, which it
itself has made in the midst of the Saharan sands. But in the winter,
which is here a time of luminous drought and changeless blue skies, it
is in full swing. Then every day, from dawn until the evening prayer,
the men are busy at their water-drawing, transformed for the time into
tireless machines, with muscles that work like metal bands. The action
never changes, any more than the song, and often their thoughts must
wander from their automatic toil, and lose themselves in some dream,
akin to that of their ancestors who were yoked to the same rigging four
or five thousands years ago. Their torsos, deluged at each rising of the