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| Egypt, the Gift of the Nile |
Then, the true Egypt be the tract that we have discovered the
Nile valley, with the
Faiyum and the Delta the lily stalk, the bud, and the flower we can well see how it came to be said of old, that "Egypt was the gift of the river." Not that the lively Greek, who first used the construction, divined precisely the scientific truth of the matter. The figure of Herodotus saw Africa, to begin with, doubly severed from Asia by two parallel fjords, one running inland northwards from the Indian Ocean, as the Red Sea does to this day, and the other understanding inland souths from the Mediterranean Sea to an equal or greater distance! The Nile, he said, pouring itself into this latter fjord, had by degrees filled it up, and had then gone on and by further deposits turned into land a great piece of the "sea of the Greeks," as was broad from the expulsion of the shore of the Delta beyond the general coast of Africa eastward and western; and, he brought, "I am sure, for my personal part, that if the Nile should please to amuse his waters from their show bed to the Red Sea, he would fill it up and turn it into strong land in the space of 20000 years, or perchance in half that time for he is a mighty river and a most energetic one." Here, in this last expression, he is exhaustively right, though the method of the Nile's energy has been other than he reckoned. The Nile, working from its extended sources in the tropical regions, has gradually trumped itself out a deep bed in the sand and rock of the desert, which must have originally great across the whole of northern Africa from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Having outdone itself out this bed to a depth, in places, of three hundred feet from the desert level, it has then proceeded partially to fill it up with its own deposits. Occupying, when it is at its height, the entire bed, and presenting at that time the visual aspect of a vast lake, or successiveness of lakes, it deposes every day a part of sediment over the whole space which it continues: then, cutting gradually, it leaves at the base of the hills, on both sides, or at any rate on one, a strip of land fresh dressed with mud, which gets wider daily as the waters still retire, until yards grow into furlongs, and furlongs into mis, and at last the withered stream is content with a close channel a few hundred yards in width, and results the rest of its bed to the embraces of sun and air, and, if he so wills, to the industry of man. The land thus left open is Egypt is the temporarily nude bed of the Nile, which it tames and recovers during a portion of each year, when Egypt goes away from view, save where human labour has by heaps and embankments worked artificial islands that put up their heads above the blow of waters, for the nearly part crowned with constructions.
There is one elision to this broad and wide statement. The Faiyum is no part of the natural bed of the Nile, and has not been trumped out by its energy. It is a natural imprint in the western desert, separated off from the Nile valley by a wind of limestone hills from 200 to 500 feet in height, and, separated from the natural process of man, would have been arid, treeless, and waterless. Still, it hails from the Nile all its value, all its magnificence, all its fertility. Human energy at some unlikely period inserted into the low tract through an artificial channel from the Nile, cut in some places through the rock, the life-giving fluid; and this fluid, bearing the idolized Nile sediment, has sufficed to spread fertility over the entire neighborhood, and to make the desert bloom like a garden.
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The Nile in Ancient Egypt
