The Fayyum is a great and superb oasis situated upon a plateau of the desert of Libya, wonderfully fertile, rich, and bland, with a splendid climate, and springs of sweet waters which, carefully directed into a network of channels, spreading like wrinkles over the face of the land, carry life and a smiling of joy through the crowding palms, the olive and fruit trees, the corn and the brakes of the sugar-cane. The Egyptians often call it "the country of the roses," and they say that everything grows there. The fellah thinks of it as of a Paradise where man can only be happy.
Every Egyptian who has ever set the butt end of a gun against his shoulder sighs to be among its multitudinous game. The fisherman longs to let down his net into the depths of its sacred lake. The land-owner would rather have a few acres between Sennoures and Beni Suwêf than many in the other parts of Egypt. The man who is amorous yearns after the legendary beauty of its unveiled women, with their delicately tattooed chins, their huge eyes, and their slim and sinuous bodies. And scarcely is there upon the Nile a brown boy whose face will not gleam and grow expressive with desire at the sound of the words "El-Fayyum."
It is a land of Goshen, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of the heart's desire, this green tract of sweet and gracious fertility to which the Bahr-Yûsuf is kind.
But to Mrs. Armine it was from the very first a hateful land.
Their camp was pitched on a piece of brown waste ground, close to a runlet of water, near a palm-grove that shut out from them the native houses of the great village or country town of Sennoures. The land which Nigel's fellahîn were reclaiming and had reclaimed--for much of it was already green with luxuriant crops--was farther away, where the oasis runs flush with the pale yellow, or honey-coloured, or sometimes spectral grey sands of the desert of Libya. But Nigel, when he first came to the Fayyum, had first gone into camp among the palms of Sennoures, and there had heard the Egyptian Pan in the night; and he wanted to renew certain impressions, to feel them decked out, as it were, with novel graces now that he was no longer lonely; so he had ordered the camp to be pitched by the little stream that he knew, in order to savour fully the great change in his life.
The railway from Cairo goes to Sennoures, so they came by train, and arrived rather late in the afternoon. Three days later the Sacred Carpet was to depart from Cairo on its journey to Mecca, and at Madinat-al-Fayyum, and at other stations along the route, there were throngs of natives assembled to bid farewell to the pilgrims who were departing to accompany it and to worship at the Holy Places. Small and cheap flags of red edged with a crude yellow fluttered over the doors or beneath the hanging shutters of many dwellings, and the mild and limpid atmosphere was full of the chanting of the songs of pilgrimage in high and nasal voices. Once at a roadside station there was for some unexplained reason a long delay, during which Mrs. Armine sat at the window and looked out upon the crowd, while Nigel got down to stretch his legs and see the people at closer quarters. Loud and almost angry hymns rose up not only from some of the starting pilgrims, but also from many envious ones who would never be "hâjjee." Presently, just before the carriage door, a strange little group was formed; a broad, sturdy man with a brutal, almost white-skinned face garnished with a bristling black beard but no moustache, who wore the green turban, an elderly man with staring, sightless eyes, carrying a long staff, and three heavily veiled women, in thin robes partially covered with black, loose-sleeved cloaks, whose eyelids were thickly adorned with kohl, whose hands were dyed a deep orange-colour with the henna, and who rattled and clinked as they moved and the barbaric ornaments of silver and gold which circled their arms and ankles shifted upon their small-boned limbs. The blind man was singing loudly. The women, staring vacantly, held the corners of their cloaks mechanically to their already covered faces. The man with the bristling beard talked violently with friends, and occasionally, interrupting himself abruptly, joined almost furiously in the blind man's hymn. On the platform lay a few bundles wrapped in gaudy cloths and handkerchiefs. From outside the station came the perpetual twittering of women.