Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/219

 varying, except within very narrow limits, the form of the palm, she varies its angle of growth, its grouping, its artistic function and significance in the scene with a fertility of invention which seems inexhaustible. There is no tree which lends itself to so great a number or so manifold a variety of decorative purposes in landscape, none which "composes" so well, in the artist's phrase, as the palm. Alone, in groups of two or three, in clumps of a dozen or a score, in widely scattered "plantations" of fifty to a hundred, in thickest groves of double or treble that number, its effect is equally satisfying, and its value to the eye alike inestimable in all. Its simplest dispositions are full of charm and of command.

Simplicity, indeed, may almost be said to constitute the chief and abiding fascination of Nile scenery as a whole; the broadest effects, produced by the slenderest of means, abound. Here, before me, at an ordinary bend of the river—one among thousands of