42 Soil-Carriers 



Cheviot Hills already mentioned, unproductive, owing 

 to their height and the consequently severe climate. 



The top of this magnificent chain of mountains is a 

 vast table-land, upon which the rains descend heavily 

 and incessantly during some three or four months of 

 the year, the fall being so abundant as to supply five 

 tremendous mountain-torrents, which rush down the 

 sides of the mountains with the force of cataracts, and 

 carry with them enormous quantities of rock, which is 

 ground up by degrees into the finest mud and poured 

 into the Nile. The river rises so much in consequence 

 that it overflows its banks, inundating the plains of 

 Lower Egypt during four months of the year, and 

 wherever the flood comes, there it leaves behind it a 

 thin film of rich mud, which needs but little labour on 

 man's part to make it produce most abundant harvests. 

 So large is the amount of sediment brought down by 

 the river — which those who like statistics may be inter- 

 ested to know is about equal in bulk to a solid cube 

 measuring more than five feet each way transported in 

 every second — that the river-bed is gradually rising, and 

 the inundation therefore extends further and further ; 

 and very, very slowly, but still surely, more of the 

 desert is being converted into fruitful soil. Left upon 

 the Abyssinian mountains, the materials of which this 

 sediment is composed would have had little or no value 

 — for man's purposes, at least — but, transported to the 

 magnificent climate of Egypt, and mixed with other 

 matter, they form a soil which is the very perfection of 

 fertility. 



The sediment is not all deposited on the land or in the 

 river-bed, however ; much is carried into the Mediter- 

 ranean, where another delta is being gradually formed, 



