Dervish, officer and soldier, friend and foe, kneel
alike to this god of ancient Egypt and draw each day their daily water
in goatskin or canteen. Without the river none would have started.
Without it none might have continued. Without it none could ever have
returned.

All who journey on the Nile, whether in commerce or war, will pay their
tribute of respect and gratitude; for the great river has befriended
all races and every age. Through all the centuries it has performed
the annual miracle of its flood. Every year when the rains fall and the
mountain snows of Central Africa begin to melt, the head-streams become
torrents and the great lakes are filled to the brim. A vast expanse of
low, swampy lands, crossed by secondary channels and flooded for many
miles, regulates the flow, and by a sponge-like action prevents the
excess of one year from causing the deficiency of the next. Far away
in Egypt, prince, priest, and peasant look southwards with anxious
attention for the fluctuating yet certain rise. Gradually the flood
begins. The Bahr-el-Ghazal from a channel of stagnant pools and marshes
becomes a broad and navigable stream. The Sobat and the Atbara from dry
watercourses with occasional pools, in which the fish and crocodiles
are crowded, turn to rushing rivers. But all this is remote from Egypt.
After its confluence with the Atbara no drop of water reaches the Nile,
and it flows for seven hundred miles through the sands or rushes in
cataracts among the rocks of the Nubian desert. Nevertheless, in spite
of the tremendous diminution in volume caused by the dryness of the
earth and air and the heat of the sun--all of which drink greedily--the
river below Assuan is sufficiently great to supply nine millions of
people with as much water as their utmost science and energies can draw,
and yet to pour into the Mediterranean a low-water surplus current of
61,500 cubic feet per second. Nor is its water its only gift. As the
Nile rises its complexion is changed. The clear blue river becomes thick
and red, laden with the magic mud that can raise cities from the desert
sand and make the wilderness a garden. The geographer may still in
the arrogance of science describe the Nile as 'a great, steady-flowing
river, fed by the rains of the tropics, controlled by the existence of a
vast head reservoir and several areas of repose, and annually flooded
by the accession of a great body of water with which its eastern
tributaries are fl