26 On the Arabian Frontier of Egypt. 



period when the restraint of art was first imposed on its 

 Avaters, must be more remote than the most ancient histori- 

 cal records extant. For Hei'odotus mentions the Felusiac 

 branch, as behig, in his time, the most eastern arm of the 

 Nile. And one naturally asks, hov/ so vast a work as cut- 

 ting off in its prime a stream as deep and broad as a.ny re- 

 maining secondary arm of the Nile, should ever have been 

 undertaken "? — and also, when can it have been done \ — by 

 whom ■? and to what purpose I 



The bed of the Etiiaji river offers some remarkable phy- 

 sical anomalies that are only to be accounted for by the man- 

 ner of its formation. And as these may serve, in their turn, 

 to lead us towards a satisfactory answer to these inquiries, 

 we must look back a little, and consider what it was during 

 the ante-historical period. 



The Etiiam river does not appear to have been an ordi- 

 nary Delta-channel along the whole of its course, hollowed 

 out of the alluvial soil with an even and downwai'd slope to 

 the sea, like the other arms of the Nile. Part of its bed lay 

 along the bottom of a valley in the rocky district out of the 

 true Delta, and part of the bottom of this valley has a slope 

 just the contrary way. This remarkable acclivity is to be 

 seen at the spot called " Moukfar" (vide section 2), where it 

 is highest ; the slope upwards begins a little before Hero. 

 Much of this is the result of recent accumulations of sand and 

 alluvium in the most naiTow and exposed part of the valley, but 

 not all, as we shall hereafter have occasion to remark more par- 

 ticularly. A certain amount of inequality — a slight swell of 

 ground all along the cleft in the rocks that form this remark- 

 able valley, — must always have existed, forming a consider- 

 able impediment to the course of the Nile along it ; so that 

 the water, after it had reached Hero, had to rise above the 

 level of the obstacle, before it could flow off through the val- 

 ley by the downward passage already adverted to, which is a 

 natural opening in the hills, in the direction of the northern 

 marshy tract, and where the current, during the great flood of 

 1800, was so extremely rapid. 



The general level of the ground, all along the valley, from 

 near Belbeis to the Crocodile lakes, being much lower than 



