ne a few steps when a wondrous sight met my
astonished eyes: before me was the Nile, old Hapi, to give it its
ancient Egyptian name, the inexhaustible Father of Waters. Through one
of those involuntary plastic impressions which act upon the imagination,
the Nile called up to my mind the colossal marble god in one of the
lower halls of the Louvre, carelessly leaning on his elbow and, with
paternal kindliness, allowing himself to be climbed over by the little
children which represent cubits, and the various phases of the
inundation. Well, it was not under this mythological aspect that the
great river appeared to me for the first time. It was flowing in flood,
spreading out broadly like a torrent of reddish mud which scarcely
looked like water as it swelled and rushed by irresistibly. It looked
like a river of soil; scarcely did the reflection of the sky imprint
here and there upon the gloomy surface of its tumultuous waves a few
light touches of azure. It was still almost at the height of its rise,
but the flood had the tranquil power of a regular phenomenon, and not
the convulsive disorder of a scourge. The majesty of that vast sheet of
water laden with fertilising mud produces an almost religious
impression. How many vanished civilisations have been reflected for a
time in that ever-flowing wave! I remained absorbed as I gazed at it,
sunk in thought, and feeling that strange sinking of the heart which one
experiences after desire has been fulfilled, and reality has taken the
place of the dream. What I was looking at was indeed the Nile, the real
Nile, the river which I had so often endeavoured to discover by
intuition. A sort of stupor nailed me to the bank, and yet it was a very
natural thing that I should come across the Nile in Egypt in the very
centre of the Delta. But man is subject to such artless astonishment.

Dhahabiyehs and felukas spreading their great lateen sails were tacking
across the river, passing from one shore to the other, and recalling the
shape of the mystic baris of the times of the Pharaohs.

We set out again. The aspect of the country was still the same; fields
of cotton, maize, doora, stretched as far as the eye could reach. Here
and there glimmered the portions of the ground covered by the flood.
Slate-blue buffaloes wallowed in the pools and emerged covered with mud;
water birds stood along the edges, and sometimes flew off as the train
passed, watched by families of fellahs, squatting on the