The race of fellahs, the unconscious guardian of a prodigious past, slept on without desire of change, and almost without suffering.

And time passed for Egypt in a great peace of sunlight and of death.
But to-day the foreigners are masters here, and have wakened the old Nile--wakened to enslave it.

In less than twenty years they have disfigured its valley, which until then had preserved itself like a sanctuary.

They have silenced its cataracts, captured its precious water by dams, to pour it afar off on plains that are become like marshes and already sully with their mists the crystal clearness of the sky.

The ancient rigging no longer suffices to water the land under cultivation.
Machines worked by steam, which draw the water more quickly, commence to rise along the banks, side by side with new factories.