298 DR. HOOKER’S MISSION TO INDIA. 
boats. This green belt reached to the very base of the Pyramids, 
and was there met by another apparently endless desert, covered 
with a light haze, and backed by low hills of sterile sand. After a 
little space, another desert horizon rose with the light far to the 
south, the Nile again glanced in it like a twisted silver wire, its 
course marked by still other pyramids, so distant as to appear no 
more than dusky triangular spots. Beyond these, the site of Thebes, 
Memphis, Luxor, Edfou, the far-away Cataracts, and Meroe are 
seen only in the imagination. Of the appearance of the Pyra- 
mids themselves from this point one can form no idea: they are 
not beautiful, and much of their interest is derived from associa- 
tion; but they are so strongly interwoven with the earliest recol- 
lections of our species, and of our school-education, that it is 
impossible to keep the eyes or thoughts from them. 
For the first few miles out of Cairo there was scarce a trace of 
vegetation, or merely a few exposed stems here and there above the 
naked soil, wholly destitute of leaves. This is the sterile season, 
and past even seed-time in the Desert, which is, of course, not 
affected by the inundations of the Nile. About five or six miles 
south of Cairo the scenery changes totally, the country being 
more broken up into broad valleys with steep cliffy piles of lime- 
stone on each side, and every here and there a little vegetation, Zyy0- 
phyllee, Rutacee, Capparideæ, a spiny cruciferous plant, some 
tufts of grass, and a Hyoscyamus, full of leaf all the year round, 
brilliantly green, and very succulent, which resembles a Chenopo- 
dium, and spreads straggling along the ground. Some Zygophyllee 
are also green; but the few other species I saw were small-leaved, 
withered things. Of trees and bushes there are none. All the 
soil is limestone rock, with a profusion of sand and pebbles, and 
occasionally fragments of fossil-wood. As we proceeded, the bits 
of fossil-wood became more and more frequent and larger, till, about 
eight or ten miles S. E. of Cairo, the whole pebbly and rocky soil of 
the plain part of the Desert consisted of fossil-wood, chiefly rolled 
pebbles and fragments, but now and then huge trunks, prostrate 
and half-buried in the sand, always broken up into truncheons- - 
Most of them were heaped together in the greatest confusion : - 
