EGYPT may be said to owe its very existence as a habitable country to the presence of the Nile. The course of that magnificent river has now been traced to great lakes① lying across the Equator, more than two thousand miles south of Alexandria in a direct line. After receiving its two Abyssinian branches, at Khartoum and at Berber in Nubia, it pours the broad, deep volume of its waters through a flat, alluvial valley for fifteen hundred miles without being increased by any other tributary, and finally discharges itself by two principal channels and several minor outlets into the sea.
The whole of the cultivable soil of Egypt, with the exception of the oases② of the desert, consists of the meadow-land on either bank of this noble river; and it varies in width from five to one hundred and fifty English miles. It has been renowned for its fertility from the earliest ages, and was long rightly regarded as the granary of the ancient world. Even at the present day its fruitfulness is without a parallel in any region of like extent.
This fruitfulness is consequent upon the periodic inundations of the river. Although there is little or no rain in Egypt, there are continuous and heavy rains at the sources of the Nile. These begin to fall in March, and being supplemented by the melting of the mountain snows in the following months, occasion a perceptible rise in the river about the end of June. From this period to the close of September, the rise increases with a regularity almost certain and constant, at a rate of four inches a day.
When the flood is at the highest, the whole valley and delta of the Nile appear as a vast inland sea, dotted with towns and villages, and scattered mounds, barely emerging from thesurface. At this season all communication has to be maintained by boats, save where, between places of importance, a few viaducts have been raised. Between September and December the river subsides, and the land is tilled; and by June the harvest has been reaped. But the cultivators of Egypt need not limit their labours to the production of a single crop: in lands advantageously situated as many as three crops are annually raised by means of artificial irrigation, managed by water- wheels of the simplest construction; the crops being chiefly grain, cotton, and indigo.④Alexandria, the second town of Egypt, and its chief mercantile port, is but a desolate and wretched-looking city, not-withstanding the advantages it has of late years derived from its position in the route of the overland journey to India. The Turkish quarter is yetALEXANDRIAmost filthy and unwholesome, and the mass of the inhabitants are to all appearance plunged in squalor and poverty. This town, which, from its fine harbour, has been termed "The key of Egypt," does not stand on the site of the famous city built by Alexander the Great, which, according to Pliny, was fifteen miles in circuit, and contained three hundred thousand inhabitants. The ancient city, which was burnt to ashes, with its world-renowned library, by the Kaliph Omar, in the year 640, stood to the south of the present Alexandria, on a site which is now covered for the space of six or seven miles in circuit with a confused mass of ruins. Here stands the famous.
Pompey"s Pillar;⑤ and hence it was that many of the spoils which enrich the public places and the museums of European cities were derived.
The English traveller in Egypt is generally willing to get away from Alexandria as soon as he can, and that for sanitary reasons. Cairo is distant some hundred miles, and the route thither lies either along the famous canal made by order of Mehemet Ali⑥ in 1819-20, or along the railway, which hasbrought the city of Saladin⑦ within a few hours of the coast.
On approaching Cairo by way of the Nile, the Pyramids are first seen from a point in the river, here about a mile in width, near the separation of the two great branches which form the delta of Lower Egypt, about ninety miles from their outlets at the coast. Standing on the western bank of the river, on a platform elevated some fifty feet above the surrounding level, they form most striking and suggestive objects, even when viewed from a great distance.
In the neighbourhood of the Pyramids are the ruins of Memphis, the ancient capital of Lower Egypt, and the residence of the Pharaohs at the time of the exodus of the Jews. "For miles," says Dean Stanley, "you walk through layers of bones and skulls and mummy swathings, extending from the sand, and deep down in shaft-like mummy-pits; and among these mummy-pits are vast galleries filled with mummies⑧of ibises,in red jars, which are being gradually despoiled.
Lastly, there are long galleries, only recently discovered, hewn in the rock, and opening from time to time-say every fifty yards-into high arched vaults, under each of which stands the most magnificent black marble sarcophagus⑨ that can be conceived-a chamber rather than a coffin-smooth, and sculptured within and without; grander by far than even the granite sarcophagi of the Theban kings-how much grander than any human sepulchres anywhere else; and all for the successive corpses of the bull Apis!"⑩Continuing a course against the stream, the traveller passes many interesting scenes,-the great corn tract of Faioum, pits packed with crocodile mummies, rock tombs excavated in the face of the mountains, magnificent ruins and scattered monuments, as at Dendera and Thebes. One hundred miles above Thebes he reaches the first cataract (of which there are seven in all), and the town of Assouan on the borders of Nubia.