UNWRITTEN HISTORY. 325 



sheep do not find their affairs much improved when the representatives 

 of their interests are mostly mongrel Arabo-Turkish wolves (as they 

 certainly will he), they must he unfit for free institutions, and we may 

 wash our hands of them, conscious that we have exhausted the re- 

 sources of political science in our intelligent efforts to improve their 

 condition. 



The extent of the land now under cultivation in Egypt is esti- 

 mated approximately at 7,300 English square miles that is to say, its 

 area is about a fifth greater than that of the valley of the Thames 

 (6,160 square miles). One half of this cultivated land lies in the 

 delta, and the other half in Upper Egypt. Under the Pharaohs, the 

 cultivated area was of considerably greater extent ; but not even the 

 industry and thrift of the Fellaheen have been able to make head 

 against the ignorance, sloth, and greed of their later rulers. 



Above Cairo, the Libyan and the Arabian boundaries of the nar- 

 row valley of Upper Egypt, which runs in a southerly direction, 

 through 6 of latitude to Assouan in 24 north, are approximately par- 

 allel, here approaching and there diverging from one another, though 

 they are rarely more than ten or fifteen miles apart. The general in- 

 clination of the bottom of the long and winding stream, though rather 

 greater than in the delta, does not exceed five or six inches in the mile. 

 Hence, Assouan, some five hundred miles distant, in a direct line, 

 from Alexandria, is little more than three hundred feet above the 

 Mediterranean. 



In Upper Egypt there is still less rain than in the delta. For, 

 though violent storms, accompanied by a heavy down-pour, occur at 

 intervals of perhaps twenty years, filling the parched ravines of the 

 desert with short-lived torrents, there is usually either no rain, or, at 

 most, a passing shower, in the course of each year. Hence, not only 

 the boundaries of the valley, but all the country eastward as far as 

 the Red Sea, and all westward (save where a rare oasis breaks the 

 monotony of the waste) for hundreds of miles across the Sahara, over 

 which the same meteorological conditions prevail, is, if it be possible, 

 even more arid and barren than the desert which bounds the delta. 



What are known as the "tombs of the kings" are excavated in 

 the walls of a deep gorge which runs from the plain of Thebes far 

 into the Libyan Hills, the steeply escarped faces of which rise twelve 

 hundred feet above the river. From the summit of one of these hills 

 a panorama of appalling desolation presents itself. Except where the 

 Kile lies like a brown ribbon, with a broader or narrower green fringe 

 on either side, north, south, east, and west, the eye rests on nothing 

 but rugged heights of bare rock, separated by a perfect labyrinth of 

 steep- walled valleys. Baked during the day by a cloudless sun, cooled, 

 not unfrequently down to the freezing-point, at night by radiation 

 through the vaporless air, the surface-rocks are shattered by the rapid 



