e Nile takes its rise, and Gordon was to rule over a
province named after the equator.

[Illustration: MAP OF NORTH-EASTERN AFRICA, SHOWING EGYPT AND THE SUDAN.]

Immediately to the south of Cairo begins a plateau which stretches from
north to south through almost the whole continent. In Abyssinia it
attains to a considerable height, and near the equator rises into the
loftiest summits of Africa. These mountains screen off the rain from
Egypt and large areas of the Sudan. The masses of vapour which are
carried over Abyssinia in summer by the monsoon are precipitated as rain
in these mountain tracts, and consequently the wind is dry when it
reaches Nubia and Egypt; while the moisture which rises from the warm
ocean on the east, and is borne north-westwards by the constant
trade-wind, is converted into water during eight months of the year
among the mountains on the equator.

The rain which falls on the mountains of Abyssinia gives rise to the
Atbara and Blue Nile, which produce abundant floods in the Nile during
autumn; and during the rest of the year the White Nile, which comes from
the great lakes on the equator, provides for the irrigation of Egypt.
Thus the country is able to dispense with rain, and innumerable canals
convey water to all parts of the Nile valley. Many kinds of grain are
cultivated--wheat, maize, barley, rice, and durra (a kind of millet);
vegetables, beans, and peas thrive, numerous date palms suck up their
sap from the heavy, sodden silt on the river's banks, and sugar-cane and
cotton are spreading more and more. Seen at a height from a balloon, the
fields, palms, and fruit-trees would appear as a green belt along the
river, while the rest of the country would look yellow and grey, for it
is nothing but a dry, sandy desert.

The Nile, then, is everything to Egypt, the condition of its existence,
its father and mother, the source of the wealth by which the country has
subsisted since the most remote antiquity. Now that we are about to
follow Gordon along the Nile to the equator, we must not forget that we
are passing through an ancient land. The first king of which there are
records lived 3200 years before the Christian era, and the largest of
the Great Pyramids at Ghizeh is 4600 years old (Plate XXVIII.). Its
funeral crypt is cut out of the solid rock, and in it still stands the
red granite sarcophagus of Cheops. Two million three hundred thousand
dressed blocks, each measuring 40 cubic feet, wer