Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/82

64 these Nile-watered meadows, from which the bare red-brown stems of the palm trees, hardly elsewhere visible, save with their roots embedded in sandy, sterile-looking soil, uplift themselves into the golden air. Is there any other region in the world in which fertility so sweet and gracious and barrenness so fierce and forbidding can be so instantaneously exchanged? On the right, within a stone's-throw of where you stand, lie the boundless reaches of the Libyan Desert—a land inhospitable and accursed for unnumbered ages and unexplored by all-subduing man even to the present day. To the left this rich selvage of prolific soil, which the waters of the Nile have for as many recurring seasons strewn upon its shores. What wonder that so ancient a benefactor of mortals should have been worshipped as a god?

There can be very little that has been left unsaid about anything in Egypt, and least of all about that most wondrous of its many wonders, the Great Pyramid. The Titanic