"The heir will be victorious if he does not let himself be surprised by
Nitager, that is, if he concentrates all his forces and succeeds in
putting them in order of battle to meet the enemy.

"His worthiness Herhor, the minister of war, will be present in the
camp of Prince Ramses, and will report to the pharaoh."

Two ways of communication formed the boundary between the land of
Goshen and the desert. One was the transport canal from Memphis to Lake
Timrah; the other was the highroad. The canal was in the laud of
Goshen, the highroad in the desert which both ways bounded with a half
circle.

The canal was visible from almost every point upon the highroad.
Whatever artificial boundaries might be, these neighboring regions
differed in all regards. The land of Goshen, though a rolling country,
seemed a plain; the desert was composed of limestone hills and sandy
valleys. The land of Goshen seemed a gigantic chessboard the green and
yellow squares of which were indicated by the color of grain and by
palms growing on their boundaries; but on the ruddy sand of the desert
and its white hills a patch of green or a clump of trees and bushes
seemed like a lost traveler.

On the fertile land of Goshen from each hill shot up a dark grove of
acacias, sycamores, and tamarinds which from a distance looked like our
lime-trees; among these were concealed villas with rows of short
columns, or the yellow mud huts of earth-tillers. Sometimes near the
grove was a white village with flat-roofed houses, or above the trees
rose the pyramidal gates of a temple, like double cliffs, many-colored
with strange characters. From the desert beyond the first row of hills,
which were a little green, stared naked elevations covered with blocks
of stone. It seemed as if the western region, sated with excess of
life, hurled with regal generosity to the other side flowers and
vegetables, but the desert in eternal hunger devoured them in the
following year and turned them into ashes.

The stunted vegetation, exiled to cliffs and sands, clung to the lower
places until, by means of ditches made in the sides of the raised
highroad, men conducted water from the canals to it. In fact, hidden
oases between naked hills along that highway drank in the divine water.
In these oases grew wheat, barley, grapes, palms, and tamarinds. The
whole of such an oasis was sometimes occupied by one family, which when
it met another like itself at the market in Pi-Bailos migh