Poor, beautiful people, with muscles that never grow tired! Whose men in olden times moved the great stones of the temples, and knew no burden that was too heavy; whose women, with their slender, pale-tawny arms and delicate small hands, surpass by far in strength the burliest of our peasants! Poor beautiful race of bronze! No doubt it was too precocious and put forth too soon its astonishing flower--in times when the other peoples of the earth were till vegetating in obscurity; no doubt its present resignation comes from lassitude, after so many centuries of effort and expansive power.

Once it monopolised the glory of the world, and here it is now--for some two thousand years--fallen into a kind of tired sleep, which has left it an easy prey alike to the conquerors of yesterday and to the exploiters of to-day.
Another trait which, side by side with their patience, prevails amongst these true-blooded Egyptians of the countryside is their attachment to the soil, to the soil which nourishes them, and in which later on they will sleep.

To possess land, to forestall at any price the smallest portion of it, to reclaim patches of it from the shifting desert, that is the sole aim, or almost so, which the fellahs pursue in this world: to possess a field, however small it may be--a field, moreover, which they till with the oldest plough invented by man, the exact design of which may be seen carved on the walls of the tombs at Memphis.
And this same people, which was the first of any to conceive magnificence, whose gods and kings were formerly surrounded with an over-powering splendour, contrives, to live to-day, pell-mell with its sheep and goats, in humble, low-roofed cabins made out of sunbaked mud! The Egyptian villages are all of the neutral colour of the soil; a little white chalk brightens, perhaps, the minaret or cupola of the mosque; but except for that little refuge, whither folk come to pray each evening--for no one here would retire for the night without having first prostrated himself before the majesty of Allah--everything is of a mournful grey.

Even the costumes of the people are dull-coloured and wretched-looking.

It is an East grown poor and old, although the sky remains as wonderful as ever.
But all this past grandeur has left its imprint on the fellahs.