upper end; a button of a bud projects from the
stalk a little below the blossom, on the left-hand side. The broad
blossom is the Delta, extending from Aboosir to Tineh, a direct distance
of a hundred and eighty miles, which the projection of the coast--the
graceful swell of the petals--enlarges to two hundred and thirty. The
bud is the Fayoum, a natural depression in the hills that shut in the
Nile valley on the west, which has been rendered cultivable for many
thousands of years by the introduction into it of the Nile water,
through a canal known as the "Bahr Yousouf." The long stalk of the lily
is the Nile valley itself, which is a ravine scooped in the rocky soil
for seven hundred miles from the First Cataract to the apex of the
Delta, sometimes not more than a mile broad, never more than eight or
ten miles. No other country in the world is so strangely shaped, so
long compared to its width, so straggling, so hard to govern from a
single centre.

At the first glance, the country seems to divide itself into two
strongly contrasted regions; and this was the original impression which
it made upon its inhabitants. The natives from a very early time
designated their land as "the two lands," and represented it by a
hieroglyph in which the form used to express "land" was doubled. The
kings were called "chiefs of the Two Lands," and wore two crowns, as
being kings of two countries. The Hebrews caught up the idea, and though
they sometimes called Egypt "Mazor" in the singular number, preferred
commonly to designate it by the dual form "Mizraim," which means "the
two Mazors." These "two Mazors," "two Egypts," or "two lands," were, of
course, the blossom and the stalk, the broad tract upon the
Mediterranean known as "Lower Egypt," or "the Delta," and the long
narrow valley that lies, like a green snake, to the south, which bears
the name of "Upper Egypt," or "the Said." Nothing is more striking than
the contrast between these two regions. Entering Egypt from the
Mediterranean, or from Asia by the caravan route, the traveller sees
stretching before him an apparently boundless plain, wholly unbroken by
natural elevations, generally green with crops or with marshy plants,
and canopied by a cloudless sky, which rests everywhere on a distant
flat horizon. An absolute monotony surrounds him. No alternation of
plain and highland, meadow and forest, no slopes of hills, or hanging
woods, or dells, or gorges, or cascades, or rushing stre