TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 80i 



3. The Desert from Dahshur to Aln Halan} 

 By Captain Conyees Surtees. 



Captain Surtees, liaviugbeen detailed at the request of the Department of Public 

 Works to accompany Mr. Cope Whitehouse, draughted a map with contours of the 

 Fayum and Raian depressions, a copy of which was shown and explained ia 

 detail. 



4. The Bahr Yusuf} By Captain R. H. Bkown, R.E. 



.5. Between the Nile and the Bed Sea. By E. A. Floyer. 



The mountainous country between the Nile and the Red Sea partakes of much 

 ■of the interest, religious, commercial, and antiquarian, which so long has centred in 

 Egypt itself. 



Long before the Christian era its mountain solitudes and picturesque valleys 

 attracted the ophthoi, or the monks of paganism. At a later period these mountains 

 sheltered the tirst Christian monks, and the existing monasteries of St. Anthony and 

 St. Paul carry us back to this earl}^ age. A hundred miles to the south of them are 

 the ruins of the monastery of the ' Deaf Men,' and near it, in the beautiful Kittar 

 valley, near a crystal pool of water, and by the side of a running stream, rise tJie 

 ruins of a Catholic church, perhaps consecrated by Meletius, the Arian bishop of the 

 Thebaid, in the year liOO. To the monks succeeded the convicts of the Roman 

 empire, who worked in the granite quarries of Mons Claudianus. For 1,400 years 

 the whole route between Europe and the far east passed across these mountains, and 

 only ceased on the discovery by the Portuguese of the route round the Cape. 

 Three roads, leaving the Red Sea at Berenice, Kosseir, and Myos Hormos, converged 

 upon Koptos on the Nile, and were used according to circumstances. The crown- 

 ing interest of these mountains lies in the ancient quarries scattered among their 

 lofty peaks and winding valleys, and which were worked perhaps five or six 

 thousand years ago. But for many j-ears a sleep has fallen over these mountains ; 

 the ring of hammers was no longer heard, and the wells along the desert roads had 

 l:)ecome choked with sand. But a period of awakening has begun. Twenty years 

 ago the Marquis of Bassano, with his thousand workmen, began digging in the 

 Gimsa Well for sulphur; last year a colony of bearded miners set up their derricks 

 and boring engines on Jebel Zeit, the oil mountain ; and last the fine porphyry, 

 whicli can be matched nowhere in the world, is once more being quarried, and Mr. 

 Brindley, of London, is actually the direct successor of Epaphroditos, the imperial 

 freedman of Vigirium, whom the Greek inscriptions show to have been the last 

 lessee in the year 147 a.d. — more than seventeen hundred years ago. 



0. Trade Prospects with the Sudan.^ By Major Watson, B.E., C.M.G. 



7. Account of a recent Visit to the ancient Borpliyry Quarries of Egypt. 

 By W. Brindley, F.R.M.S. 



Egyptian porphyry has been sought after from the earliest times, as one of the 

 most precious building stones. Ancient writers ditlered as to the whereabouts of 

 the quarries from which that stone was obtained, and in modern times they were 

 literally rediscovered by Burton and Wilkinson in 1823, and subsequently visited 

 by Lepsius in 1845. The information published by these visitors proving of no 

 immediate practical value, the author determined to follow in the footsteps of 

 AVilkinson, and, accompanied by his wife, he came to Cairo in February last. 



' Published in the Proceedings of the Boyal Geogra-ilncil Society. 

 - This paper will be published in the journal of tie Manchester Geographical 

 Society. 



1887. 3 F 



