THE SACRED IBIS 133 
admiration and interest that follows their every 
utterance. No, the first place that you can at all 
safely look for Ibis in is south of Kartoom. It 
needs the great jungle-like brakes of papyrus that 
grow rampantly along the river-course, and which 
help to constitute the dread “sudd” of those 
waters. Immense masses of it, we are told, get 
torn off and detached when the new year’s flood 
comes rushing down, and along with other masses go 
floating onwards till they meet with some stoppage 
and then they form a dam, new masses coming 
down and down, till there may be miles of this 
floating jungle, which can, and does, get so packed 
and compressed by the weight behind it that it 
becomes nearly solid. In country like that the 
Ibis lives, and that is, all will see at once, not the 
country that Egypt is like, and therefore the Ibis 
is an absentee from the big, gently-flowing Nile 
from Assoan to Alexandria. Was it ever common 
in ancient Egypt? Not unless the conditions of 
those days were markedly different to these. The 
river rose each year then as now, and then as now 
by its rise and rush of waters must have kept 
the channel clear and the banks bare; but it is 
possible that there may have been at certain points 
big swamps where the papyrus grew, which have 
