Hah, I had the same reaction to setting up a siphon. That's for when you need to get a liquid up over a hump and down to a lower point.

You draw the liquid into a tube from the source [1] and drag the outlet to a lower point. Then, as if by magic, the higher pool gets sucked through the outlet until it's drained, without any mechanical pump.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siphon

[1] you can do it by sucking it in like a straw, but there are less gross ways like using a flexible bottle to provide pumping action