the Delta, where it joins the main
stream. The left branch penetrates westward through a gap in the
Libyan escarpments into the Fayum depression, ramifying into a thousand
irrigating rills, and pouring its overflow into the Birket-el-Qarum, or
"Lake of Horns," which still floods the lowest cavity and is a remnant
of the famous ancient Lake Moris. The Fayum, which is the territory
reclaimed from the former lake, is now an exceedingly productive
district, a sort of inland delta, fed like the marine delta by the
fertilising flood-waters of the Nile.

The traveller Junker wrote of this district in 1875: "I found myself
surrounded by a garden tract of unsurpassed fertility, where there was
scarcely room for a path amid the exuberant growths; where pedestrians,
riders, and animals had to move about along the embankments of countless
canals. Now a land of roses, of the vine, olive, sugar-cane, and cotton,
where the orange and lemon plants attain the size of our apple-trees, it
was in primeval times an arid depression of the stony and sandy Libyan
waste."

North of the Fayum the Nile flows on to Cairo, where the narrow water
way allowed to its course by the two lines of cliffs widens, and the
cliffs recede to the right and left. There is thus space for the waters
to spread and ramify over the alluvial plain. Nearly all this portion
of Egypt has been covered by the sediment of the Nile, and from the
earliest times there have been numerous distinct branches or channels of
the river running out by separate openings into the sea. As several of
these branches have been tapped to a great extent for irrigation, all
except two have ceased to be true outlets of the Nile. In the Greek
period there were seven mouths and several [...Greek...], or "false
mouths." The two remaining mouths are those of Rosetta and Damietta, and
these were always the most important of the number. They branched off
formerly close to the present spot where Cairo stands, a little below
Memphis; but during two thousand years the fork has gradually shifted to
about thirteen miles lower down.

The triangular space enclosed by these two branches and the sea-coast
was called by the Greeks the delta, on account of the likeness in
shape to the Greek letter of that name A. At the head, or apex, of the
triangle stands the famous barrage, or dam, begun in 1847 by Mehemet
Ali, for the twofold purpose of reclaiming many thousand acres of waste
land, and of regulating the