He kept his head down that
he might not look his last on his native city.
He had reached that point where endurance must conserve itself.
CHAPTER XXXVII
AT THE WELL
Once out of its confines the Nile divided its flood over and over again
and hunted the sea in long meanderings over the flat Delta. A few
miles above On the separation began and continued to the marshy coast
far to the north. From the summit of the great towers of Bubastis and
Sais the glistening sinuosities of its branches might be discerned for
many miles.
There was no thirst in the Delta. Nowhere did the capillary, the
irrigation canal, fail to reach, even now in the season of desolation
and loss. Half-green stubble, hail-mown and locust-eaten, showed where
a wheat-field had been. Regular, barren rows were the only evidences
of the lentil and garlic gardens in happier days, and the location of
pastures might be guessed by the skeletons that whitened the uplands.
Through fringes of leafless palm trees, stone-rimmed pools, like
splashes of quicksilver or facets of sapphire, reflected the sky.
Half-way between On and Pa-Ramesu was one of these basins, elliptical
in shape and walled with rough limestone. Moss grew in the crevices of
the masonry and about it had been a sod of velvet grass.
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