‘A JOURNEY IN THE EAST’ 243 
Egyptian cultivation—high farming, pent within narrow 
bounds. True fellaheen villages alternated with palm-groves 
larger than those of Lower Egypt, and our attention was 
attracted by whole towns of round dovecotes built in real 
Arab style. Thousands of Rock-Doves here find shelter and 
protection simply for the sake of their valuable guano, their 
eggs and down being also occasionally taken. These birds 
never become quite domesticated, but are semi-wild in their 
habits, and in size and colour remain true Rock-Doves. 
The rail runs on the left side of the Nile, often close to the 
bank. To the east one sees the desert mountains approaching . 
the river, and to the west the undulating, almost flat, Libyan 
desert : it also passes all the Pyramids, quite near enough to 
admit of their being well seen. First come the hoary piles of 
Gizeh, the proudest of their race; and these are soon followed 
by their smaller relatives of Sakkara, while the extensive 
palm-forests of Bedrascheen and Memphis heighten the tho- 
roughly African character of the landscape. We Europeans 
are accustomed to look with wonder at solitary palms in hot- 
houses or on the southern coasts of our ill-dowered quarter of 
the globe ; but only in the great rustling palm-forests is this 
tree invested with its full force as the symbol of glowing 
Africa. 
About 10 a.m. we branched off from the main line which 
follows the Nile to Siut, turning due west into the lonely 
barren waste; and strange and wonderful it seemed to be 
travelling by rail through these grandly desolate regions. 
Ata single stride one steps beyond the limit of the Nile 
inundations, and passes from a vegetation blessed with moisture, 
and teeming with a luxuriance such as the Dark Continent 
alone can generate, into the death-like stillness of the lifeless 
waste. 
Any one who imagines the desert to be flat and quite level, 
like many of the Hungarian “ pusztas” or the marshy land in 
R2 
