s by the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and on the two others by two imaginary
lines which the map-makers kindly draw for us across the sands of the
desert. But "this Egypt," as has been well observed, "is a fiction of
the geographers, as untrue to fact as the island Atlantis of Greek
legend, or the Lyonnesse of mediaeval romance, both sunk beneath the
ocean to explain their disappearance. The true Egypt of the old
monuments, of the Hebrews, of the Greeks and Romans, of the Arabs, and
of its own people in this day, is a mere fraction of this vast area of
the maps, nothing more than the valley and plain watered by the Nile,
for nearly seven hundred miles by the river's course from the
Mediterranean southwards."[1] The great wastes on either side of the
Nile valley are in no sense Egypt, neither the undulating sandy desert
to the west, nor the rocky and gravelly highland to the east, which
rises in terrace after terrace to a height, in some places, of six
thousand feet. Both are sparsely inhabited, and by tribes of a different
race from the Egyptian--tribes whose allegiance to the rulers of Egypt
is in the best times nominal, and who for the most part spurn the very
idea of submission to authority.

If, then, the true Egypt be the tract that we have described--the Nile
valley, with the Fayoum and the Delta--the lily stalk, the bud, and the
blossom--we can well understand how it came to be said of old, that
"Egypt was the gift of the river." Not that the lively Greek, who first
used the expression, divined exactly the scientific truth of the matter.
The fancy of Herodotus saw Africa, originally, _doubly_ severed from
Asia by two parallel _fjords_, one running inland northwards from the
Indian Ocean, as the Red Sea does to this day, and the other penetrating
inland southwards from the Mediterranean to an equal or greater
distance! The Nile, he said, pouring itself into this latter _fjord_,
had by degrees filled it up, and had then gone on and by further
deposits turned into land a large piece of the "sea of the Greeks," as
was evident from the projection of the shore of the Delta beyond the
general coast-line of Africa eastward and westward; and, he added, "I am
convinced, for my own part, that if the Nile should please to divert his
waters from their present bed into the Red Sea, he would fill it up and
turn it into dry land in the space of twenty thousand years, or maybe in
half that time--for he is a mighty river and a m