178 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
wild ass was recorded by James Burton in 1823 in the desert north-east 
of Keneh; he remarks that then the Arabs of this part of the desert let 
their female donkeys loose to be served by the wild males.’ Later, in 
1828, Linant de Bellefonds saw many wild asses in the region between 
Darawi and Berber; they were, he says, often trapped by the Bisharin, 
who used the flesh as food. During the first half of the eighteenth 
century the ostrich frequented the desert near Suez.* A hundred years 
later it was reported to be numerous in the Arabian Desert opposite 
Esneh, and there is a wadi, some distance south-east of Aswan, that 
is called by the Arabs Wadi Naam, ‘the Wadi of Ostriches.’ In the 
Libyan Desert the bird was fairly common in the eighteenth century. 
W. G. Browne, who travelled along the coast west of Alexandria in 
1792, states that tracks of the ostrich were frequently seen, and he noted 
also that the bird sometimes appeared in the neighbourhood of the 
Wadi Natran.* Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1799 reported that it was then 
common in the mountains south-west of Alexandria.?° In 1837 Lord 
Lindsay saw the ostrich near Esneh,*! but the northern limit of the bird 
is now very much further south. ‘The lion is mentioned by Sonnini at 
the end of the eighteenth century as one of the larger carnivora which 
then approached the confines of Egypt, but did not long remain in the 
country. 
Now the appearance of all these animals in Egypt and in its border- 
ing deserts in dynastic times presupposes that the vegetation of the 
wadies was much more abundant then than now, and this again pre- 
supposes a greater rainfall than we find at present. The disappearance 
of the dynastic fauna is not, however, entirely due to the change in 
climatic conditions. The Arabs have a saying that it was the camel 
that drove the lion out of Egypt, and this is doubtless true. The 
lion depends mainly on the antelope tribe for its food supply. The 
antelopes, on the other hand, depend for their sustenance on herbage 
and grass, and this has been consumed to a great extent by the camels, 
which, since Arab times, have been bred in great numbers in the 
Arabian and Nubian Deserts. It is certain that the advent of the 
camel was a factor in driving southwards many of the wild animals 
that were at cne time so common in Egypt, but are now characteristic 
of the Ethiopian region. 
The characteristic wild trees of the dynastic flora of Egypt, as we 
know from the remains of them that have been found in the ancient 
tombs, were the heglik (Balanites eqyptiaca), the seyal (Acacia seyal), 
the stint (Acacia nilotica), the tamarisk (Tamarix nilotica), the nebak 
(Zizyphus spina-Christi), the sycomore-fig (Ficus sycomorus), and the 
moringa (Moringa aptera). The dom palm (Hyphene thebaica) and 
the Dellach palm (H. arqun) were also common. ‘The heglik does not 
now grow wild north of Aswan, and, of the other trees, only the stint 
and the tamarisk are really common in the Lower Nile Valley. All 
these trees, however, now grow in abundance in the region north of 
the Atbara, and it is here, in what is called the Taka country, that we 
find also the fauna that was once so abundant in more northerly regions. 
But if the fauna and flora of the Arabian and Libyan Deserts in 
dynastic times approached more closely to that now seen in the Taka 
F 
* 
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