plain, and in the middle of it a lake
with a bending line of shores and a sunken bottom.

But on these plains, hills, and heights no blade of grass grows; in the
lake there is no drop of water; along the bed of the river no current
moves. That is a landscape, even greatly varied with respect to forms,
but a landscape from which all water has departed, the very last atom
of moisture has dried from it; a dead landscape, where not only all
vegetation has vanished, but even the fertile stratum of earth has been
ground into dust or dried up into rock slabs.

In those places the most ghastly event has taken place of which it is
possible to meditate: Nature has died there, and nothing remains but
her dust and her skeleton, which heat dissolves to the last degree, and
burning wind tosses from spot to spot.

Beyond this dead, unburied region stretches again a sea of sand, on
which are seen, here and there, towering up in one and another place,
pointed stacks as high as a house of one story. Each summit of such a
little hill is crowned by a small bunch of gray, fine, dusty leaves, of
which it is difficult to say that they are living; but it may be said
that they cannot wither.

One of these strange stacks signifies that water in that place has not
dried up altogether, but has hidden from drought beneath the earth, and
preserves dampness in some way. On that spot a tamarind seed fell, and
the plant has begun to grow with endless effort.

But Typhon, the lord of the desert, has noted this, and begun to stifle
it with sand. And the more the little plant pushes upward, the higher
rises the stack of sand which is choking it. That tamarind which has
wandered into the desert looks like a drowning man raising his arms, in
vain, heavenward.

And again the yellow boundless ocean stretches on with its sand waves
and those fragments of the plant world which have not the power to
perish. All at once a rocky wall is in front, and in it clefts, which
serve as gateways.

The incredible is before us. Beyond one of these gateways a broad green
plain appears, a multitude of palms, the blue waters of a lake. Even
sheep are seen pasturing, with cattle and horses. From afar, on the
sides of a cliff, towers up a town; on the summit of the cliff are the
white walls of a temple.

That is an oasis, or island in the sand ocean.

In the time of the pharaohs there were many such oases, perhaps some
tens of them. They formed a chain of islands in