650 
“Small clumps of palms mark the villages, and now 
and again, but rarely, lengthen or widen out into larger 
plantations. What other trees there are, sycamores, 
tamarisks, or thorns, stand for the most part singly near 
the desert edge. The squat mud cabins, dominated often 
by the white ‘Italianate’ house of a shezkh, are raised a 
little on their own débris. The long line of a curving 
dyke, carrying beside a canal a cultivation road or 
a railway, cuts the horizon. The angles of white 
sails or a smoky funnel indicate the river; the chimney 
of a sugar factory is a landmark for miles. The rest is 
one flat stretch of varying hues, brown, green, red or 
yellow, according to the season, or is for two months a 
burnished sheet of inundation, now wider, now narrower, 
now defined by high cliffs, now melting into an easy 
gradient of desert, now more to east, anon more to west 
of the central stream. . . . Serious change in the land- 
scape occurs only far south and far north. Above Silsileh 
the green belt narrows to a thread. Golden ruin of the 
sandstone slides on the west almost to the margin of 
Nile, and low cliffs rise steeply to east with little interval 
of plain ; and presently, with the intrusion of plutonic 
rocks, the scenery loses all amenity and the river flows 
with obstructed current between beetling crags which 
only recede to admit the naked waste within a few yards 
of the stream. Far northward again the deep lands 
grow ever more salt and_ sodden, till reedy marsh super- 
venes and passes insensibly into permanent inundation ; 
and shallow and slimy meres with few intervals stretch 
all the length of the Delta base, washing their wavelets 
on the low sand hills and bars of stony beach, which 
scarcely keep out the discoloured sea.” 
Mr. Hogarth does not say much of the peculiar 
beauties of Egypt, beauties of distance and of light: 
the Arabian wall aboye Girga seen from the Libyan 
cultivation-border, nine or ten miles away, through and 
over a noonday haze ; the bastions of Kasr es-Sayad or 
the three peaks of Gebel el-Geir at sunset, salients aglow 
with richest rose, recesses blue with deepest indigo; 
Luxor approached across the western sands towards 
evening, when even that abominable castellated villa- 
residence which flies the Dutch flag cannot spoil the 
marvellous effect ; things not only not to be forgotten, 
but to be seen again, for no country excites in the minds 
of most such a SeAmsucht as Egypt. Greece does not ; 
were it not for her historical associations she would be 
of no more interest to the average man than is Albania ; 
she possesses naturally no such fascination as Egypt, 
beautiful as she is. 
“The natural beauties of Greece,” says Mr. Hogarth 
(p. 122), “are those of distance, beauties of outline on a 
large scale, beauties of white snows and grey rocks in 
juxtaposition to an ever present sea of deepest blue, 
beauties of opalescent lights cast by oblique rays shining 
through suspended dust raised by the daily winds.” 
Beauties of detail there are few; all is so patchy and 
scrubby. Yet what can be more delightful than the view 
as one descends to Marathon from above Araphén, 
looking over the broad Gulf of Petali to where Ocha 
raises its mighty snow-clad mass into the sky? Of the 
views of Greece from Lykabettos or from the splendid 
Frankish castle which crowns the Larissa of Argos we 
need not speak ; the first at least, or its smaller edition 
from the terrace of Niké Apteros, is almost too well 
known, especially at sunset ; but the second enables one 
to realise very well the small geographical extent of 
continental Hellas, for from the keep of the Larissa the 
NO. 1722, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
[OcTOBER 30, 1902 
eye can range from Parnon to Parnassus, roughly then 
from Sparta to Delphi. 
Greece plays impudence to Egypt’s dignity. Mono- 
tonous this dignity may be, yet this very monotony only 
serves to make it the more impressive. Such beauty as 
Greece has Egypt does not possess, beauty of sea and 
snow-mountain ; yet nothing in Greece can so subdue the 
beholder to its fascination as can those interminable 
bastioned hills with the sand-billows washing half-way 
up their sides, those curving, branching wadis behind 
them where on the sand the once water-worn boulders lie 
blackened by ages of exposure to an unpitying sun, or that 
monotonous fen which with its palm-clumps, its strings of 
laden donkeys or camels winding their dusty way along 
the raised gzs7s or causeways, its innumerable sakiyas 
each with its boy (in charge of the motive power, a pair 
of oxen or buffaloes), chanting his monotonous song in 
duet with the groaning of his machine as he is carried 
round and round, stretches away to where in the hazy 
distance a shimmering line of cliff marks the opposite 
limit of Egypt. Greece always interests and often 
charms ; Egypt zfonzrt. 
We have said that Mr. Hogarth’s book gives the 
reader much to think about. Naturally this is very much 
the case when he touches on political matters. His 
touch is light, as befits a book of this kind ; his intention 
is simply to draw the reader’s attention to matters with 
regard to which it is necessary that he should form some 
opinion for himself. The Persian Gulf, for one example, 
the future of Arabia for another. Is the Power which 
holds Aden and Cairo and dominates Muscat and Kowét 
eventually to hold sway at Er-Riadh and Hayil either as 
she now rules at Ajmir or as she controls Bikanfr or 
Baluchistan? This 1s a question which will have to be 
faced in the future. 
Mr. Hogarth’s appreciations of the peoples who 
inhabit the region which he describes are interesting ; 
his note on the modern Greek character (p. 241) is worth 
quoting :— 
“ Unprejudiced appreciations of the character of South 
Balkan peoples are very rare. The Greek character, 
especially, is seldom treated justly by a northern ob- 
server, apt to remember the ancient Hellene too much or 
too little. The Oriental element does not give endurance 
and dignity to Latin decadence in Greece as in Spain, 
because it is not due to the intrusion of a strong Oriental 
race. To be fair, the Briton must overcome his strong 
aversion to ideas without works. ... In published ac- 
counts of the Greeks one has usually to do with social, 
religious, or scholarly idealists with little knowledge of 
the realities. To their views a course of Byron’s letters 
from Greece and Finlay’s final volume supplies a salutary 
corrective.” 
Strictly speaking, we might cavil at Mr. Hogarth’s 
attribution of modern Greek want of stedfastness and 
want of dignity to the intrusion of an Oriental race not 
so strong as that which has intruded into Spain. Dignity 
Spain has, but grit she has no more than Greece ; surely 
also the Turk is, as an Oriental, really stronger than, if 
not so dignified as, the Arab. 
An editorial note at the beginning of the book tells us 
that 
“Owing to Mr. Hogarth’s absence in Crete at the time 
when it was necessary that this book should go to press, 
