s, roughly
parallel at a mean distance of about twelve miles.

During the earlier ages the river filled all this intermediate space;
and the sides of the hills, polished, worn, blackened to their very
summits, still bear unmistakable traces of its action. Wasted and
shrunken within the deeps of its own ancient bed, the stream now makes a
way through its own thick deposits of mud. The bulk of its waters keep
to the east, and constitutes the true Nile, the "Great River" of the
hieroglyphic inscriptions. At Khartoum the single channel in which the
river flowed divides, and two other streams are opened up in a southerly
direction, each of them apparently equal in volume to the main stream.

Which is the true Nile? Is it the Blue Nile, which seems to come down
from the distant mountains? Or is it the White Nile, which has traversed
the immense plains of equatorial Africa? The old Egyptians never knew.
The river kept the secret of its source from them as obstinately as it
withheld it from us until a few years ago. Vainly did their victorious
armies follow the Nile for months together, as they pursued the tribes
who dwelt upon its banks, only to find it as wide, as full, as
irresistible in its progress as ever. It was a fresh-water sea--_iauma,
ioma_ was the name by which they called it. The Egyptians, therefore,
never sought its source. It was said to be of supernatural origin, to
rise in Paradise, to traverse burning regions inaccessible to man, and
afterwards to fall into a sea whence it made its way to Egypt.

The sea mentioned in all the tales is, perhaps, a less extravagant
invention than we are at first inclined to think. A lake, nearly as
large as the Victoria Nyanza, once covered the marshy plain where the
Bahr-el-Abiad unites with the Sobat and with the Bahr-el-Ghazal.
Alluvial deposits have filled up all but its deepest depression, which
is known as Birket Nu; but in ages preceding our era it must still have
been vast enough to suggest to Egyptian soldiers and boatmen the idea of
an actual sea opening into the Indian Ocean.

Everything is dependent upon the river--the soil, the produce of the
soil, the species of animals it bears, the birds which it feeds--and
hence it was the Egyptians placed the river among their gods. They
personified it as a man with regular features, and a vigorous but portly
body, such as befits the rich of high lineage. Sometimes water springs
from his breast; sometimes he presents a frog,