Our journey around the world; an illustrated record of a year's travel of forty thousand . with only a slit large enough for two piercing blackeyes to shine through. Over her nose is a curious brasscontrivance like a great supplementary nose, which seems toattach the veil to the upper part of the headdress. Here- isanother woman with a heavy water jar on her head, whichshe carries, standing proudly erect, in a way that showsthat she has been used to such burdens from her earliestgirlhood. At another station we see a whole family ofArabs squatting upon the platform, the women veiled as
Our journey around the world; an illustrated record of a year's travel of forty thousand . with only a slit large enough for two piercing blackeyes to shine through. Over her nose is a curious brasscontrivance like a great supplementary nose, which seems toattach the veil to the upper part of the headdress. Here- isanother woman with a heavy water jar on her head, whichshe carries, standing proudly erect, in a way that showsthat she has been used to such burdens from her earliestgirlhood. At another station we see a whole family ofArabs squatting upon the platform, the women veiled as GREEN FIELDS AND WAVING PALMS. 379 those we have already described, though the little girls areallowed to go with uncovered faces. For the most part,they are a stupid, degraded lot of human beings, with noth-ing of aspiration in their eyes, and no desire to be anythingbut the hewers of wood and the drawers of water whichthey and their ancestors have been for so many centuries. After a few miles of this desert journey, we grow ratherlistless and indifferent to that which may be seen outside the. ON THE BANKS OP THE NILE. car window, but suddenly we are aroused from our indiffer-ence by an entrancing sight of green fields and fertile gar-dens and waving palm trees. It is as though we had comeinto a fairy land, out of a very prosaic workaday indeed we have entered fairy land, and the magicianthat works the wonder is none other than old Father sends out his life-giving waters, and whatever he touchessprings into new life and blossoms like the rose. The line ofdemarcation between the desert and the well-favored lands 380 IN THE LAND OF JOSEPH AND MOSES. of the Nile is clear and distinct; one moment the train is inthe arid purgatory of the desert, the next it is in the smilingparadise of the oasis. And this first fertile tract to which we have come is noneother than the Goshen of the Bible. No wonder that theaged Jacob rejoiced when his long pilgrimage was over andh
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade189, booksubjectvoyagesaroundtheworld
