Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/41

 CHAPTER II THE STORY OF EGYPT Section 6. Egypt and its Earliest Inhabitants The traveler who visits Egypt at the present day lands in a Egypt of very modern looking harbor at Alexandria. He is presently ° ^^ seated in a comfortable railway car in which we may accom- pany him as he is carried rapidly across a low flat country, stretch- ing far away to the sunlit horizon. The wide expanse is dotted with little villages of* dark, mud-brick huts, and here and there rise groves of graceful palms. The landscape is carpeted with stretches of bright and vivid green as far as the eye can see, and wandering through this verdure is a network of irrigation canals (Fig. lo). Brown-skinned men of slender build, with dark hair, are seen at intervals along the banks of these canals, sway- ing up and down, keeping time with the song they sing, as they lift an irrigation bucket attached to a simple device (Fig. 9), exactly like the " well sw^eep " of our grandfathers in New England. It is kept going day and night, as one man relieves another, and the irrigation trenches, branching all over the field, are thus kept full of water for about a hundred days until the grain ripens. It is the best of evidence that Egypt enjoys no rain. The black soil we see from the train is unexcelled in fertility, its soil and and it is enriched each year by the overflow of the river, whose roily waters rise above its banks every summer, spread far over the flats (Fig. i o), and stand there long enough to deposit a very thin layer of rich earthy sediment. All this plain over which the train moves southward consists of such sediment, which the river has brought down from its sources far away in Africa. In the course of ages it has filled up the ancient I 17 area