58 THE WORLD'S WONDERS. 



thousand men were occupied for three years removing a single 

 stone from Elephantine to Sais ; that the canal of the Red Sea 

 cost the lives of a hundred and twenty thousand Egyptians ; and 

 that to build one of the Pyramids required the labor of three 

 hundred and sixty thousand men for twenty years. This reckless 

 disregard for the people so impoverished the lower classes, chiefly 

 by confiscations, that subsistence became finally so difficult that 

 families were compelled to support life almost exclusively from 

 the fruit of date trees. 



This was the condition of the most civilized portion of Egypt ; 

 but when we describe the life found in Central Africa, there will 

 be found influences so nearly identical that we must conclude 

 there were the same causes operating throughout the whole 

 country, to keep it in darkness and terror. While the potentates 

 of Central Africa are never wealthy, as we value possessions, 

 yet they hold their subjects by hooks of steel, as it were, and 

 place no estimate whatever on human life, using it only as it may 

 please or advantage them. Through all Africa, therefore, as 

 well as in Egypt, there is seen the slave-mark, the curse of all 

 uncivilized nations. 



THE RIVER NILE. 



OF all rivers which traverse the habitable portions of the 

 earth, the Nile is pre-eminently the grandest ; grand not alone 

 because it flows through the wild, dark, pathless region, nor 

 because of its long-hidden source, but because of its singular 

 character in its adaptation to the sand-covered, scorching desert 

 which it cleaves, spreading a wondrous fertility over the otherwise 

 barren and uninhabitable waste, fructifying the sands and estab- 

 lishing a seat for the earliest civilization. Oh, marvelous Nile ! 

 Oh, wonderful Egypt ! That great country in which the infant 

 of industry and progress was cradled ; which gave to science its 

 swaddling clothes, and nursed art and religion into strong and 

 imperishable vitality, has not only been sustained by the Nile's 

 gifts of prodigal fertility, but was created by the alluvial soil 

 which flowed down through the long centuries, and deposited 

 in continual accretions to the delta. Thus has Egypt grown 



