the desert, along the
western boundary of Egypt. They lay at a distance of ten, fifteen, or
twenty geographic miles from the Nile, and varied in size from a few to
a few tens of square kilometers in area.

Celebrated by Arab poets, these oases were never really the forecourts
of paradise. Their lakes are swamps for the greater part; from their
underground sources flow waters which are warm, sometimes of evil odor,
and disgustingly brackish; their vegetation could not compare with the
Egyptian. Still, these lonely places seemed a miracle to wanderers in
the desert, who found in them a little green for the eye, a trifle of
coolness, dampness, and some dates also.

The population of these islands in the sand ocean varied from a few
hundred persons to numbers between ten and twenty thousand, according
to area. These people were all adventurers or their descendants,
Europeans, Libyans, Ethiopians. To the desert fled people who had
nothing to lose, convicts from the quarries, criminals pursued by
police, earth-tillers escaping from tribute, or laborers who left hard
work for danger. The greater part of these fugitives died on the sand
ocean. Some of them, after sufferings beyond description, were able to
reach the oases, where they passed a wretched life, but a free one, and
they were ready at all times to fall upon Egypt for the sake of an
outlaw's recompense.

Between the desert and the Mediterranean extended a very long, though
not very wide strip of fruitful soil, inhabited by tribes which the
Egyptians called Libyans. Some of these worked at land tilling, others
at navigation and fishing; in each tribe, however, was a crowd of wild
people, who preferred plunder, theft, and warfare to regular labor.
That bandit population was perishing always between poverty and warlike
adventure; but it was also recruited by an influx of Sicilians and
Sardinians, who at that time were greater robbers and barbarians than
were the native Libyans.

Since Libya touched the western boundary of Lower Egypt, barbarians
made frequent inroads on the territory of his holiness, and were
terribly punished. Convinced at last that war with Libyans was result-
less, the pharaohs, or, more accurately, the priesthood, decided on
another system: real Libyan families were permitted to settle in the
swamps of Lower Egypt, near the seacoast, while adventurers and bandits
were enlisted in the army, and became splendid warriors.

In this way the state se