124 MUD. 



Hoang Ho, the Yang-tse-Kiang ; of the Po, the Ehone, 

 the Danube, the Ehine, the Volga, the Dnieper ; of the 

 St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Orinoco, 

 the Amazons, the La Plata. A corn-field is just a big 

 mass of mud ; and the deeper and purer and freer from 

 stones or other impurities it is the better. 



But England, you say, is not a great river-mud field ; 

 yet it supports the densest population in the world. 

 True ; but England is an exceptional product of modern 

 civilization. She can't feed herself : she is fed from 

 Odessa, Alexandria, Bombay, New York, Montreal, 

 Buenos Ayres - in other words, from the mud fields of 

 the Eussian, the Egyptian, the Indian, the American, the 

 Canadian, the Argentine rivers. Orontes, said Juvenal, 

 has flowed into Tiber ; Nile, we may say nowadays, with 

 equal truth, has flowed into Thames. 



There is nothing to make one realize the importance of 

 mud, indeed, like a journey up Nile when the inundation 

 is just over. You lounge on the deck of your dahabieh, 

 and drink in geography almost without knowing it. The 

 voyage forms a perfect introduction to the study of mud- 

 ology, and suggests to the observant mind (meaning you 

 and me) the real nature of mud as nothing else on earth 

 that I know of can suggest it. For in Egypt you get 

 your phenomenon isolated, as it were, from all disturbing 

 elements. You have no rainfall to bother you, no local 

 streams, no complex denudation : the Nile does all, and 

 the Nile does everything. On either hand stretches 

 away the bare desert, rising up in grey rocky hills. Down 

 the midst runs the one long line of alluvial soil in other 

 words, Nile mud which alone allows cultivation and 



