A thousand miles up the Nile, with upwards - NYU | Digital Library ...

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
strong in the limbs, full-lipped, brown-skinned, we see him
wearing the same loin-cloth, plying the same shaduf, ploughing
with the same plough, preparing the same food in the same
way, and eating it with his fingers from the same bowl, as
did his forefathers of six thousand years ago.
The household life and social ways of even the provincial
gentry are little changed. Water is poured on one's hands before
going to dinner from'just such a ewer and into just such a basin
as we see pictured in the festival-scenes at Thebes. Though the
lotus-blossom is missing, a bouquet is still given to each guest
when he takes his place at table. The head of the sheep
killed for the banquet is still given to the poor. Those who
are helped to meat or drink touch the head and breast in
acknowledgment, as of old. The musicians still sit at the
lower end of the hall ; the singers yet clap their hands in
time to their own voices ;. the dancing-girls still dance, and
the buffoon in his high cap still performs his uncouth antics,
for the entertainment of the guests. Water is brought to
table in jars of the same shape manufactured at the same
town, as in the days of Cheops and Chephren ; and the mouths
of the bottles are filled in precisely the same way with fresh
leaves and flowers. The cucumber stuffed with minced-meat
was a favourite dish in those times of old ; and I can testify
to its excellence in 1874. Little boys in Nubia yet wear the
side-lock that graced the head of Rameses in his youth ; and
little girls may be seen in a garment closely resembling the
girdle worn by young princesses of the time of Thothmes the
First. A Sheykh still walks with a long staff; a Nubian
belle still plaits her tresses in scores of little tails ; and the
pleasure-boat of the modern Governor or Mudir, as well as
the dahabeeyah hired by the European traveller, reproduces
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