Looking now along the shore, beneath me lies the harbor in the form of a crescent-the right horn occupied by the palace of the Pasha, his hareem, and a battery; the left, a long low sweep of land, alive with windmills, the city in the centre: to the westward, the flat, sandy shore stretches monotonously away to the horizon; to the eastward, the coast merges into Aboukir Bay.

Having taken this general view of our first Egyptian city, let us enter it in a regular manner to view it in detail. The bay is crowded with merchant vessels of every nation, among which tower some very imposing-looking three-deckers, gigantic but dismantled; the red flag with the star and crescent flying from the peak. Men-of-war barges shoot past you with crews dressed in what look like red night-caps and white petticoats. They rise to their feet at every stroke of the oar, and pull all out of time. Here, an ocean patriarch" (as the Arabs call Noah), with white turban and flowing beard, is steering a little ark filled with unclean looking animals of every description; and there, a crew of swarthy Egyptians, naked from the waist upward, are pulling some pale-faced strangers to a vessel with loosed top-sails, and blue-peter flying.

66

At length, amid a deafening din of voices and a pestilential effluvia from dead fish and living Arabs, you fight your way ashore and if you had just awakened from a sleep of ages, you could scarcely open your eyes upon a scene more different from those you have just left. The crumbling quays are piled with bales of eastern merchandise, islanded in a sea of white turbans, wreathed over dark, melancholy faces. Vivid eyes glitter strangely upon solemn-looking and bearded countenances. High above the variegated crowds peer the long necks of hopeless-looking camels. Wriggling and struggling amidst all this mass were picturesquely ragged little boys, dragging after them shaven donkeys with carpet saddles, upon one of which you suddenly find yourself seated with scarcely a volition of your own, and are soon galloping along filthy lanes, with blank, white, windowless and doorless walls on either side, and begin to wonder when you are to arrive at the Arab city. You have already passed through it, and are emerging into the

Frank quarter, a handsome square of tall white houses, over which the flags of every nation in Europe denote the residences of the various consuls. In this square is an endless variety of races and costumes most picturesquely grouped together, and lighted brilliantly by a glowing sun in a cloudless sky. In one place, a drove of camels are kneeling down, with jet black slaves in white turbans, or crimson caps, arranging their burdens; in another, a procession of women waddles along, wrapped in large shroud-like veils from head to foot, with a long black bag, like an elephant's trunk, suspended from their noses, and permitting only their kohl-stained eyes to appear. In another, a group of Turks in long flowing drapery are seated in a circle smoking their chibouques in silence, and enjoying society after the fashion of other gregarious animals; grooms with petticoat trousers are leading horses with crimson velvet saddles, richly embroidered; a detachment of sad-looking soldiers in white cotton uniform is marching by to very wild music; and here and there a Frank with long moustaches is lounging about, contempleting these unconscious tableaux which seem to have been got up for his amusement.

CHAPTER VI.

THE NILE-ITS BATTLE.

The Nile! the Nile! I hear its gathering roar,
No vision now, no dream of ancient years-
Throned on the rocks, amid the watery war,
The King of Floods, old Homer's Nile, appears.
With gentle smile, majestically sweet,

Curbing the billowy steeds that vex them at his feet.

LORD LINDSAY

The spirit of our fathers

Shall start from every wave;

For the deck it was their field of fame,
And ocean was their grave.

CAMPBELL.

"EGYPT is the gift of the Nile," said one* who was bewildered by its antiquity before our History was born (at least he is called the father of it). A bountiful gift it was, that the "strange, mysterious, solitary stream" bore down in its bosom from the luxuriant tropics to the desert. For many an hour have I stood upon the city-crowning citadel of Cairo, and gazed unweariedly on the scene of matchless beauty and wonder that lay stretched beneath my view: cities and ruins of cities, palmforests and green savannahs, gardens, and palaces, and groves of olive. On one side, the boundless desert, with its pyramids; on the other, the land of Goshen, with its luxuriant plains, stretching far away to the horizon.

Yet this is an exotic land! That river, winding like a serpent through its paradise, has brought it from far regions, unknown to man. That strange and richly-varied panorama has had a long voyage of it! Those quiet plains have tumbled

* Herodotus.

down the cataracts; those demure gardens have flirted with the Isle of Flowers,* five hundred miles away; those very pyramids have floated down the waves of Nile. To speak chemically, that river is a solution of Ethiopia's richest regions, and that vast country is merely a precipitate. At Pæstum one sees the remnant of a city elaborated from mountain streams; the Temple of Neptune came down from the Calabrian Hills, by water and the Forum, like Demosthenes, prepared itself for its tumult-scorning destiny among the dash of torrents, and the crash of rocks; but here we have a whole kingdom, risen, like Aphroditè, from the wave.

The sources of this wonderful river are still veiled in mystery-it is the very heroine of geographical romance, often and warmly wooed, but never won. War has tried to ravish her by force, and Commerce to bribe her by its gold, but the Naïad of the Nile is as virgin as ever. The remotest inhabitants seem to know as little of its origin, yet more remote: I have conversed with slave-dealers familiar with Abyssinia as far as the Galla country, and still their information was bounded by that vague word-south: still from the south gushed the great river.

This much is certain, that from the junction of the Taccaze or Astaboras, the Nile runs a course of upwards of twelve hundred miles to the sea, without one tributary stream-" exemple," as Humboldt says, "unique dans l'histoire hydrographique du globe." During this career, it is exposed to the evaporation of a burning sun, drawn off into a thousand canals, absorbed by porous and thirsty banks, drunk by every living thing, from the crocodile to the pasha, from the papyrus to the palm-tree; and yet, strange to say, it seems to pour into the sea a wider stream than it displays between the cataracts a thousand miles away.

The Nile is all in all to the Egyptian: if it withheld its waters for a week, his country would become a desert; it waters and manures his fields, it supplies his harvests, and then

* Elephantina.

For an account of the formation of the travertine of which Pæstum was built, see Sir Humphrey Davy's "Last Days of a Philosopher."

Formerly, when vexed by the armaments of a Sesostris or the priestly pageants of a Pharaoh, the Nile required seven mouths to vent its murmurs to the sea. In modern times, it finds two sufficient; Damietta, of crusading memory, presides over one, and Rozetta, in Arabic "el Rashid," the birth-place of our old friend Haroban, takes advantage of the other. The former is waited upon by Lake Menzaleh, where alone the real ibis and the papyrus are now found-the latter looks eastward on Lake Bourlos, and westward over Aboukir Bay, of glorious

memory.

'Tis an old story now, that battle of the Nile, but a brave story can never die of age; and as the traveller paces by these silent and deserted shores, that have twice seen England's flag "triumphant over wave and war," he lives again in the stirring days when the scenery before him was the arena whereon France and England contended for the empire of the East.

Let us rest from blazing sun and weary travel in the cool shadow of this palm-tree. Our camels are kneeling round us, and our Arabs light their little fires in silence. They remember well the scenes we are recalling, though many a Briton has almost forgotten them, and the names of Nelson and of Abercrombie are already sounding faint through the long vista of departed times. We overlook the scene of both their battles, and envy not Thermopyla to the Spartan, or Salamis to the Athenian.

i. e. 250 leagues from its embouchure, is 543 French feet above the level of the Mediterranean: it runs at the rate of about three miles an hour during its flood, and two during its low water. The deposit of the river, of which the country is composed, yields by analysis three-fifths of alumina, one-fifth of carbonate of lime, one-twentieth of oxide of iron (which communicates the reddish color to its waters), some carbonate of magnesia, and pure silex. The mean rate of accumulated soil seems to be about four inches in a century in Lower Egypt; and about forty feet depth of soil has thus been flung over the desert since the deluge. In the time of Maris, the lands were sufficiently watered, if the Nile rose to the height of eight cubits; in the time of Herodotus, it required fifteen cubits; and now the river must rise to the height of twenty-two before the whole country is overflowed. Still, as the deposits increase the Delta, the river is proportionately dammed up, and thus the great watering-machine is kept in order by Nature, with a little assistance from Mehemet Ali.