poor must live and that I am immensely rich. An amiable, an almost
enticing seductiveness seems emanating from the fertile soil, shining
in the golden air, gleaming softly in the amber sands, dimpling in the
brown, the mauve, the silver eddies of the Nile. It steals upon one. It
ripples over one. It laps one as if with warm and scented waves. A sort
of lustrous languor overtakes one. In physical well-being one sinks
down, and with wide eyes one gazes and listens and enjoys, and thinks
not of the morrow.

The dahabiyeh--her very name, the _Loulia_, has a gentle, seductive,
cooing sound--drifts broadside to the current with furled sails, or
glides smoothly on before an amiable north wind with sails unfurled.
Upon the bloomy banks, rich brown in color, the brown men stoop and
straighten themselves, and stoop again, and sing. The sun gleams on
their copper skins, which look polished and metallic. Crouched in his
net behind the drowsy oxen, the little boy circles the livelong day with
the sakieh. And the sakieh raises its wailing, wayward voice and sings
to the shadoof; and the shadoof sings to the sakieh; and the lifted
water falls and flows away into the green wilderness of doura that, like
a miniature forest, spreads on every hand to the low mountains, which do
not perturb the spirit, as do the iron mountains of Algeria. And always
the sun is shining, and the body is drinking in its warmth, and the soul
is drinking in its gold. And always the ears are full of warm and drowsy
and monotonous music. And always the eyes see the lines of brown bodies,
on the brown river-banks above the brown waters, bending, straightening,
bending, straightening, with an exquisitely precise monotony. And always
the _Loulia_ seems to be drifting, so quietly she slips up, or down, the
level waterway.

And one drifts, too; one can but drift, happily, sleepily, forgetting