57

LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 431

ing cattle is to us peculiar. The donkeys, horses, cows and camels are not
allowed to roam over the field as with us, but are tethered to stakes driven
down in the ground. They eat all before them leaving the land behind them
as though it had been mowed with a scythe or a sickle. They present a pleasant picture, standing in rows like soldiers, with their heads towards the tall
vegetation and seemingly as orderly as civilized people at their dining
tables.

Every effort is made to get as much of the Nile water as possible. Ditches
are cut, ponds are made and men are engaged day and night in dipping it up
and having it placed where it is most needed. The two processes adopted by
which to raise this water are the Shaduf and the Sakiyeh. Long lines of
women are sometimes seen with heavy earthen jars on their heads distribut-
ing this precious fertilizing water over the thirsty land. Seeing the value of
this water and how completely the life of man and beast is dependent upon
it, one cannot wonder at the deep solicitude with which its rise is looked for,
watched and measured.

Egypt may haw invented the plow, but it has not improved upon the
invention. The kind used there is perhaps as old as the time of Moses and
consists or two or three pieces of wood so arranged that the end of one piece
turns no furrow, but simply scratches the soil. Still, in the distance, the man
how holds this contrivance, and the beast that draws it, look very much as if
they were plowing. I am told however, that this kind of plow does better
service for the peculiar soil of Egypt than ours would do; that the experiment
of tilling the ground with our plow has been tried in Egypt and has failed, so
that the cultivation of the soil, like many other things, is best where it
answers its purposes best and produces the best results.

Cairo with its towers, minarets, and mosques presents a strangely fasci-
nating scene, especially from the Citadel, where away off in the distance,
rising hetween the yellow desert and the soft, blue cloudless sky, we discern
the unmistakahle forms or those mysterious piles of masonry, the Pyramids.
Who huilt them and for what purpose they were built are questions which no
man has been able to satisfactorily answer. According to one theory they
were huilt for sepulchral purposes, and, according to another they were built
for a standard of measurement, but neither theory has set aside the other, and
both may be wrong. There they stand, however, grandly, in sight of Cairo,
just in the edge of the Libyan desert and overlooking the valley of the Nile,
as they have stood during more than three thousand years and are likely to
stand as many thousand years longer, for nothing grows old here but time
and that lives on forever.