system of administration, government, and religion, that we
infer a long past of accumulated centuries behind them. It must always
be difficult to estimate exactly the length of time needful for a race
as gifted as were the Ancient Egyptians to rise from barbarism into a
high degree of culture. Nevertheless, I do not think that we shall be
misled in granting them forty or fifty centuries wherein to bring so
complicated an achievement to a successful issue, and in placing their
first appearance at eight or ten thousand years before our era.
Their earliest horizon was a very limited one. Their gaze might wander
westward over the ravine-furrowed plains of the Libyan desert without
reaching that fabled land of Manu where the sun set every evening; but
looking eastward from the valley, they could see the peak of Bakhu,
which marked the limit of regions accessible to man.

Beyond these regions lay the beginnings of To-nutri, the land of the
gods, and the breezes passing over it were laden with its perfumes, and
sometimes wafted them to mortals lost in the desert.[*]

* The perfumes and the odoriferous woods of the Divine
Land were celebrated in Egypt. A traveller or hunter,
crossing the desert, "could not but be vividly impressed by
suddenly becoming aware, in the very midst of the desert, of
the penetrating scent of the _robul (Puliciaria undulata_,
Schwbine.), which once followed us throughout a day and two
nights, in some places without our being able to distinguish
whence it came; as, for instance, when we were crossing
tracts of country without any traces of vegetation whatever."
(Golenischeff).

Northward, the world came to an end towards the lagoons of the Delta,
whose inaccessible islands were believed to be the sojourning-place
of souls after death. As regards the south, precise knowledge of it
scarcely went beyond the defiles of Gebel Sil-sileh, where the last
remains of the granite threshold had perhaps not altogether disappeared.
The district beyond Gebel Silsileh, the province of Konusit, was still
a foreign and almost mythic country, directly connected with heaven by
means of the cataract. Long after the Egyptians had broken through this
restricted circle, the names of those places which had as it were marked
out their frontiers, continued to be associated in their minds with the
idea of the four cardinal points. Bakhu and Manu were still the most
frequent