very peculiar character. It must have
consisted of such plants only as could exist under the condition of having the soil in
Which they grew laid, for a quarter of the year, wholly under water. This circumstance,
probably, prevented the valley of the Nile from having been, like other fertile tracts of
land, encumbered, in its native state, with forests. For the same reason, wild beasts could
never have haunted it. There were no forests to shelter them, and no refuge or retreat for
them but the dry and barren desert, during the period of the annual inundations. This most
extraordinary valley seems thus to have been formed and preserved by Nature herself for
the special possession of man. She herself seems to have held it in reserve for him from
the very morning of creation, refusing admission into it to every plant and every animal
that might hinder or disturb his occupancy and control. And if he were to abandon it now
for a thousand years, and then return to it once more, he would find it just as he left it,
ready for his immediate possession. There would be no wild beasts that he must first
expel, and no tangled forests would have sprung up, that his ax must first remove. Nature
is the husbandman who keeps this garden of the world in order, and the means and
machinery by which she operates are the grand evaporating surfaces of the seas, the
beams of the tropical sun, the lofty summits of the Abyssinian Mountains, and, as the
product and result of all this instrumentality, great periodical inundations of summer rain.
For these or some other reasons Egypt has been occupied by man from the most remote
antiquity. The oldest records of the human race, made three thousand years ago, speak of
Egypt as ancient then, when they were written. Not only is Tradition silent, but even
Fable herself does not attempt to tell the story of the origin of her population. Here stand
the oldest and most enduring monuments that human power has ever been able to raise. It
is, however, somewhat humiliating to the pride of the race to reflect that the loftiest and
proudest, as well as the most permanent and stable of all the works which man has ever
accomplished, are but the incidents and adjuncts of a thin stratum of alluvial fertility, left
upon the sands by the subsiding waters of summer showers.
The most important portion of the alluvion of the Nile is the northern portion, where the
valley widens and opens toward the sea, forming a triangular plain of about one hundred
miles in length on each of the sides, over which the waters of the river flow in a great
number of separate creeks and channels. The whole area forms a vast meadow,
intersected every where with slow-flowing streams of water, and presenting on its surface
the most enchanting pictures of fertility, abundance, and beauty. This region is called the
Delta of the Nile.
The sea upon the coast is shallow, and the fertile country formed by the deposits of the
river seems to have projected somewhat beyond the line of the coast; although, as the
land has not advanced perceptibly for the last eighteen hundred years, it may be
somewhat doubtful whether the whole of the apparent protrusion is not due to the natural
conformation of the coast, rather than to any changes made by the action of the river.
The Delta of the Nile is so level itself, and so little raised above the level of the
Mediterranean, that the land seems almost a continuation of the same surface with the sea,
only, instead of blue waters topped with white-crested waves, we have broad tracts of
waving grain, and gentle swells of land crowned with hamlets and villages. In
approaching the coast, the navigator has no distant view of all this verdure and beauty. It
lies so low that it continues beneath the horizon until the ship is close upon the shore. The
first landmarks, in fact, which the seaman makes, are the tops of trees growing apparently
out of the water, or the summit of an obelisk, or the capital of a pillar, marking the site of
some ancient and dilapidated city.
The most easterly of the channels by which the waters of the river find their way through
the Delta to the sea, is called, as it will be seen marked upon the map, the Pelusiac branch.
It forms almost the boundary of the fertile region of the Delta on the eastern side. There
was an ancient city named Pelusium near the mouth of it. This was, of course, the first
Egyptian city reached by those who arrived by land from the eastward, traveling along
the shores of the
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