MUD. 125 



life in that rainless district. The country bases itself 

 absolutely on mud. The crops are raised on it ; the 

 houses and villages are built of it ; the land is manured 

 with it ; the very air is full of it. The crude brick 

 buildings that dissolve in dust are Nile mud solidified ; 

 the red pottery of Assiout is Nile mud baked hard ; the 

 village mosques and minarets are Nile mud whitewashed. 

 I have even seen a ship's bulwarks neatly repaired with 

 mud. It pervades the whole land, when wet, as mud 

 undisguised ; when dry, as dust-storm. 



Egypt, says Herodotus, is a gift of the Nile. A truer 

 or more pregnant word was never spoken. Of course it 

 is just equally true, in a way, that Bengal is a gift of the 

 Ganges, and that Louisiana and Arkansas are gifts of 

 the Mississippi ; but with this difference, that in the case 

 of the Nile the dependence is far more obvious, far freer 

 from disturbing or distracting details. For that reason, 

 and also because the Nile is so much more familiar to 

 most English-speaking folk than the American rivers, I 

 choose Egypt first as my type of a regular mud-land. 

 But in order to understand it fully you mustn't stop all 

 your time in Cairo and the Delta ; you mustn't view it 

 only from the terrace of Shepheard's Hotel or the rocky 

 platform of the Great Pyramid at Ghizeh : you must 

 push up country early, under Mr. Cook's care, to Luxor 

 and the First Cataract. It is up country that Egypt 

 unrolls itself visibly before your eyes in the very process 

 of making : it is there that the full importance of good, 

 rich black mud first forces itself upon you by undeniable 

 evidence. 



For remember that, from a point above Berber to the 



