INTRODUCTION. 
XXV 
stretching from the Eed Sea to the Atlantic, is cleft by 
one solitary thread of water. Ages before man could 
have existed in that inhospitable land, that thread of 
water was at its silent work : through countless years 
it flooded and fell, depositing a rich legacy of soil upon 
the barren sand until the delta was created ; and man, 
at so remote a period that we have no clue to an 
approximate date, occupied the fertile soil thus born of 
the river Nile, and that corner of savage Africa, rescued 
from its barrenness, became Egypt, and took the first 
rank in the earth’s history. 
For that extraordinary land the world has ever 
contended, and will yet contend. 
From the Persian conquest to the present day, 
although the scene of continual strife, Egypt has been 
an example of almost uninterrupted productiveness. Its 
geographical position afforded peculiar advantages for 
commercial enterprise. Bounded on the east by the Red 
Sea, on the north by the Mediterranean, while the 
fertilising Nile afforded inland communication, Egypt 
became the most prosperous and civilized country of 
the earth. Egypt was not only created by the Nile, 
but the very existence of its inhabitants depended upon 
the annual inundation of that river : thus all that 
related to the Nile was of vital importance to the 
people ; it w T as the hand that fed them. 
Egypt depending so entirely upon the river, it was 
natural that the origin of those mysterious waters 
should have absorbed the attention of thinking men. It 
was unlike all other rivers. In July and August, when 
European streams were at their lowest in the summer 
heat, the Nile was at the flood! In Egypt there 
was no rainfall—not even a drop of dew in those 
parched deserts through which, for 860 miles of lati¬ 
tude, the glorious river flowed without a tributary. 
Licked up by the burning sun, and gulped by the 
exhausting sand of Nubian deserts, supporting all 
losses by evaporation and absorption, the noble flood 
shed its annual blessings upon Egypt. An anomaly 
