with untiring patience set itself to the proper
task of river, which in this accursed zone might well have seemed
an impossible one. First it had to round all the blocks of granite
scattered in its way in the high plains of Nubia; and then, and more
especially, to deposit, little by little, successive layers of mud, to
form a living artery, to create, as it were, a long green ribbon in the
midst of this infinite domain of death.

How long ago is it since the work of the great river began? There is
something fearful in the thought. During the 5000 years of which we have
any knowledge the incessant deposit of mud has scarcely widened this
strip of inhabited Egypt, which at the most ancient period of history
was almost as it is to-day. And as for the granite blocks on the plains
of Nubia, how many thousands of years did it need to roll them and to
polish them thus? In the times of the Pharaohs they already had their
present rounded forms, worn smooth by the friction of the water, and the
hieroglyphic inscriptions on their surfaces are not perceptibly effaced,
though they have suffered the periodical inundation of the summer for
some forty or fifty centuries!

It was an exceptional country, this valley of the Nile; marvellous and
unique; fertile without rain, watered according to its need by the great
river, without the help of any cloud. It knew not the dull days and the
humidity under which we suffer, but kept always the changeless sky of
the immense surrounding deserts, which exhaled no vapour that might dim
the horizon. It was this eternal splendour of its light, no doubt, and
this easiness of life, which brought forth here the first fruits of
human thought. This same Nile, after having so patiently created the
soil of Egypt, became also the father of that people, which led the way
for all others--like those early branches that one sees in spring,
which shoot first from the stem, and sometimes die before the summer.
It nursed that people, whose least vestiges we discover to-day with
surprise and wonder; a people who, in the very dawn, in the midst of the
original barbarity, conceived magnificently the infinite and the divine;
who placed with such certainty and grandeur the first architectural
lines, from which afterwards our architecture was to be derived; who
laid the bases of art, of science, and of all knowledge.

Later on, when this beautiful flower of humanity was faded, the Nile,
flowing always in the midst of