y Elephantine,
and Meroe, cities of the Ethiopians, the Catadupi, the Red Sea, and the
Scenite Arabs, whom we now call Saracens. On the north it joins a vast
track of land, where Asia and the Syrian provinces begin; on the west it
is bounded by the Sea of Issus, which some call the Parthenian Sea.

3. We will also say a few words concerning that most useful of all
rivers, the Nile, which Homer calls the AEgyptus; and after that we will
enumerate other things worthy of admiration in these regions.

4. The sources of the Nile, in my opinion, will be as unknown to
posterity as they are now. But since poets, who relate fully, and
geographers who differ from one another, give various accounts of this
hidden matter, I will in a few words set forth such of their opinions as
seem to me to border on the truth.

5. Some natural philosophers affirm that in the districts beneath the
North Pole, when the severe winters bind up everything, the vast masses
of snow congeal; and afterwards, melted by the warmth of the summer,
they make the clouds heavy with liquid moisture, which, being driven to
the south by the Etesian winds, and dissolved into rain by the heat of
the sun, furnish abundant increase to the Nile.

6. Some, again, assert that the inundations of the river at fixed times
are caused by the rains in Ethiopia, which fall in great abundance in
that country during the hot season; but both these theories seem
inconsistent with the truth--for rain never falls in Ethiopia, or at
least only at rare intervals.

7. A more common opinion is, that during the continuance of the wind
from the north, called the Precursor, and of the Etesian gales, which
last forty-five days without interruption, they drive back the stream
and check its speed, so that it becomes swollen with its waves thus
dammed back; then, when the wind changes, the force of the breeze drives
the waters to and fro, and the river growing rapidly greater, its
perennial sources driving it forward, it rises as it advances, and
covers everything, spreading over the level plains till it resembles the
sea.

8. But King Juba, relying on the text of the Carthaginian books, affirms
that the river rises in a mountain situated in Mauritania, which looks
on the Atlantic Ocean, and he says, too, that this is proved by the fact
that fishes, and herbs, and animals resembling those of the Nile are
found in the marshes where the river rises.

9. But the Nile, passing through the d