330 



flourishing towns, and the habitations of man. Every 

 thing living has disappeared ; silence is within and 

 around every wall, and the deserted villages are like 

 the dead, whose skeletons strike with horrour."* 



In the description of Oxyrinchus, once a famous 

 city of Egypt, we have the following account : " Oxy- 

 rinchus, once a metropolis surrounded by a fertile 

 plain, two leagues off the Lybian range of hills, has 

 disappeared beneath the sand ; and the new town has 

 been obliged to retreat from this desolating invasion, 

 leaving to its ravages house after house, and the inha- 

 bitants must at last be driven beyond the canal Jusef, 

 on the border of which they will still be threatened."^ 



In the general description of the inundation of the 

 sands from the deserts, this author gives us the fol- 

 lowing gloomy and distressing picture. 



" At more than ten leagues from Cairo, we disco- 

 vered the points of the pyramids piercing the horizon 5 

 soon after we saw Mount Katham, and opposite to it, 

 the chain of hills which separates Egypt from Lybia, 

 and forms a barrier to the banks of the Nile against 

 the sands of the desert; but in this eternal conflict 

 between this destructive scourge, and the beneficent 

 river, the inundation of sand often overwhelms the 

 country, changes its fertility to barrenness, drives the 

 labourer from his house, whose walls it covers up, and 

 leaves no other mark of vegetable life, than the tops of 



* Denon, vol. i. p. 191. 

 t Denon, vol. i. p. 373. 



