462 
SANDS OF EGYPT. 
suspension consequently promoted. Thus the winds and the 
water, moving in contrary directions, join in producing a com¬ 
mon effect. 
The sand, blown over the Delta and the cultivated land 
higher up the stream during the inundation, is covered or 
mixed with the fertile earth brought down by the river, and 
no serious injury is sustained from it. That spread over the 
same ground after the water has subsided, and during the 
short period when the soil is not stirred by cultivation or cov¬ 
ered by the flood, forms a thin pellicle over the surface as far 
as it extends, and serves to divide and distinguish the succes¬ 
sive layers of slime deposited by the annual inundations. The 
particles taken up by the wind on the sea beach are borne 
onward, by a hopping motion, or rolled along the surface, 
until they are arrested by the temporary cessation of the wind, 
by vegetation, or by some other obstruction, and they may, in 
process of time, accumulate in large masses, under the lee of 
rocky projections, buildings, or other barriers which break the 
force of the wind. 
In these facts we find the true explanation of the sand 
drifts, which have half buried the Sphinx and so many other 
ancient monuments in that part of Egypt. These drifts, as I 
have said, are not primarily from the desert, but from the sea; 
and, as might be supposed from the distance they have trav¬ 
elled, they have been long in gathering. While Egypt was a 
great and flourishing kingdom, measures were taken to protect 
its territory against the encroachment of sand, whether from 
the desert or from the sea; but the foreign conquerors, who 
destroyed so many of its religious monuments, did not spare 
its public works, and the process of physical degradation un¬ 
doubtedly began as early as the Persian invasion. The urgent 
necessity, which has compelled all the successive tyrannies of 
Egypt to keep up some of the canals and other arrangements 
for irrigation, was not felt with respect to the advancement of 
the sands ; for their progress was so slow as hardly to be per¬ 
ceptible in the course of a single reign, and long experience 
has shown that, from the natural effect of the inundations, the 
