its deserts, seems to have had for
mission, during nearly two thousand years, the maintenance on its banks
of a kind of immobility and desuetude, which was in a way a homage of
respect for these stupendous relics. While the sand was burying the
ruins of the temples and the battered faces of the colossi, nothing
changed under this sky of changeless blue. The same cultivation
proceeded on the banks as in the oldest ages; the same boats, with the
same sails, went up and down the thread of water; the same songs kept
time to the eternal human toil. The race of fellahs, the unconscious
guardian of a prodigious past, slept on without desire of change, and
almost without suffering. And time passed for Egypt in a great peace of
sunlight and of death.

But to-day the foreigners are masters here, and have wakened the
old Nile--wakened to enslave it. In less than twenty years they have
disfigured its valley, which until then had preserved itself like a
sanctuary. They have silenced its cataracts, captured its precious water
by dams, to pour it afar off on plains that are become like marshes and
already sully with their mists the crystal clearness of the sky. The
ancient rigging no longer suffices to water the land under cultivation.
Machines worked by steam, which draw the water more quickly, commence to
rise along the banks, side by side with new factories. Soon there will
scarcely be a river more dishonoured than this, by iron chimneys and
thick, black smoke. And it is happening apace, this exploitation of
the Nile--hastily, greedily, as in a hunt for spoils. And thus all its
beauty disappears, for its monotonous course, through regions endless
alike, won us only by its calm and its old-world mystery.

Poor Nile of the prodigies! One feels sometimes still its departing
charm, stray corners of it remain intact. There are days of transcendent
clearness, incomparable evenings, when one may still forget the ugliness
and the smoke. But the classic expedition by dahabiya, the ascent of the
river from Cairo to Nubia, will soon have ceased to be worth making.

Ordinarily this voyage is made in the winter, so that the traveller may
follow the course of the sun as it makes its escape towards the southern
hemisphere. The water then is low and the valley parched. Leaving the
cosmopolitan town of modern Cairo, the iron bridges, and the pretentious
hotels, with their flaunting inscriptions, it imparts a sense of sudden
peacefulness to pass a