t; and when Athor went forth the
next day to destroy, she saw no men in the fields, but only water, which
she drank, and it pleased her, and she went away satisfied.

It would require another Euhemerus to find any groundwork of history in
these narratives. We must turn away from the "shadow-land" which the
Egyptians called the time of the gods on earth, if we would find trace
of the real doings of men in the Nile valley, and put before our readers
actual human beings in the place of airy phantoms. The Egyptians
themselves taught that the first man of whom they had any record was a
king called M'na, a name which the Greeks represented by Men or Menes.
M'na was born at Tena (This or Thinis) in Upper Egypt, where his
ancestors had borne sway before him. He was the first to master the
Lower country, and thus to unite under a single sceptre the "two
Egypts"--the long narrow Nile valley and the broad Delta plain. Having
placed on his head the double crown which thenceforth symbolized
dominion over both tracts, his first thought was that a new capital was
needed. Egypt could not, he felt, be ruled conveniently from the
latitude of Thebes, or from any site in the Upper country; it required a
capital which should abut on both regions, and so command both. Nature
pointed out one only fit locality, the junction of the plain with the
vale--"the balance of the two regions," as the Egyptians called it; the
place where the narrow "Upper Country" terminates, and Egypt opens out
into the wide smiling plain that thence spreads itself on every side to
the sea. Hence there would be easy access to both regions; both would
be, in a way, commanded; here, too, was a readily defensible position,
one assailable only in front. Experience has shown that the instinct of
the first founder was right, or that his political and strategic
foresight was extraordinary. Though circumstances, once and again,
transferred the seat of government to Thebes or Alexandria, yet such
removals were short-lived. The force of geographic fact was too strong
to be permanently overcome, and after a few centuries power gravitated
back to the centre pointed out by nature.

If we may believe the tradition, there was, when the idea of building
the new capital arose, a difficulty in obtaining a site in all respects
advantageous. The Nile, before debouching upon the plain, hugged for
many miles the base of the Libyan hills, and was thus on the wrong side
of the valley. It was