WATER-JARS AND WATER-CARRIERS.
The pitcher may go to the well often, but comes home broken at
last.—_Old Proverb._
Every drop of water that has ever been used for domestic purposes—the
waterworks of Cairo and Alexandria are innovations only of yesterday—has,
with the exception of the small quantity conveyed in goat-skins by men,
been brought up out of the river and canals by women. Their custom has
been to carry it on their heads in large earthen jars, called goollehs.
These are so large that they are capable of being formed into rafts,
which you often meet upon the river, with two men upon each steering
and punting them along. This is the way in which they are taken from
the places, where they are manufactured, to be distributed to the towns
and villages along the banks of the stream. Each weighs when full, as
near as I could tell by lifting one, about forty pounds. Wherever you
may be you see the women trooping down to the river-bank with these jars
on their heads to fetch water. Arrived at the water’s edge, each woman
tucks her short and scanty skirts between her legs, and, walking a step
or two into the stream, fills her goolleh. She then faces round to the
bank, and sets it down on the ground. The next move is to face back
again to the stream, and wash her feet. When ready to depart she receives
the assistance of the one who will go next into the water in placing the
full jar on her head. The last of the troop has no assistance. With forty
pounds weight on their heads they walk up the steep bank, and, perhaps,
a mile or two off to the village, making as light of it as if it were no
more than a chignon. The practice of carrying these weights on the head
gives an erectness to the figure, and a prominency to the chest, which
nothing else could produce.
Though I have at times smoked out a cigar while watching an incessant
stream of these women coming down to, and going up from, the
watering-place, I never heard one speak to another. I suppose they
reserve what they have to say till they can say it unobserved by the
bearded sex. Nor did I ever see one of them cast a glance upon a
stranger. I quite believe what a native told me of them—that it would be
regarded as a portent, if one of the very poorest class were in the least
to commit herself in this way. I once saw one of my companions—a tall,
good-looking young fellow—walk up to a damsel as good-looking as himself,
who had filled her goolleh, and set it on the edge of the stream till she
had washed her feet. As she turned round for it, he lifted it for her,
and placed it on her head. I narrowly watched her face. She ought to have
been somewhat taken by surprise, for she knew not that he was behind her;
but of this there was no indication. She did not look at him, or move a
feature: there was no apparent consciousness of any one being present.
The instant the jar was on her head, she walked away just as she would
have done, had it been her sister who had lifted it for her.
One is astonished at the mountains of broken crockery, or pottery,
which mark the sites of the ancient cites. That well nigh all the water
used in Egypt, for so many thousands of years, has had to be carried
in these earthen jars—for there is no wood in Egypt to make bowls and
buckets—and that the cooking utensils of the mass of the people must be
made of the same fragile material—for Egypt, except in times of unusual
prosperity, has no metals cheap enough for this purpose—will account
for no inconsiderable part of the accumulations. These shards have gone
a long way towards forming the barrows in which lie buried Abydos,
Memphis, Esné, Edfou, Thebes, Dendera, and scores of other places. The
importance, in its day, of any one of these ages-ago-effaced cities may
be roughly estimated by observing the magnitude of the barrow in which it
is buried. The mounds at Alexandria—and even already at modern Cairo—are
of surprising dimensions. Had they brought up the water from the river
in wooden buckets, which would have decayed, or had they cooked in metal
utensils—the materials of which, when they became unserviceable for
cooking, would have been turned to some other account—these mounds would
have been less conspicuous objects than they are now.