to each other, and
gradually shut in the horizon until it seems as though they would unite.
And there the Delta ends, and Egypt proper has begun.

It is only a strip of vegetable mould stretching north and south between
regions of drought and desolation, a prolonged oasis on the banks of the
river, made by the Nile, and sustained by the Nile. The whole length of
the land is shut in between two ranges of hills, roughly parallel at a
mean distance of about twelve miles.[**]

* By the end of the Byzantine period, the fork of the river
lay at some distance south of Shetnufi, the present
Shatanuf, which is the spot where it now is. The Arab
geographers call the head of the Delta Batn-el-Bagaraji, the
Cow's Belly. Ampere, in his Voyage en Egypte et en Nubie, p.
120, says,--"May it not be that this name, denoting the place
where the most fertile part of Egypt begins, is a
reminiscence of the Cow Goddess, of Isis, the symbol of
fecundity, and the personification of Egypt?"

**De Roziere estimated the mean breadth as being only a
little over nine miles.

During the earlier ages, the river filled all this intermediate space,
and the sides of the hills, polished, worn, blackened to their very
summits, still bear unmistakable traces of its action. Wasted, and
shrunken within the deeps of its ancient bed, the stream now makes a way
through its own thick deposits of mud. The bulk of its waters keeps
to the east, and constitutes the true Nile, the "Great River" of the
hieroglyphic inscriptions. A second arm flows close to the Libyan
desert, here and there formed into canals, elsewhere left to follow
its own course. From the head of the Delta to the village of Demt it
is called the Bahr-Yusuf; beyond Derut--up to Gebel Silsileh--it is the
Ibrahimiyeh, the Sohagiyeh, the Raian. But the ancient names are unknown
to us. This Western Nile dries up in winter throughout all its upper
courses: where it continues to flow, it is by scanty accessions from
the main Nile. It also divides north of Henassieh, and by the gorge of
Illahun sends out a branch which passes beyond the hills into the basin
of the Fayurn. The true Nile, the Eastern Nile, is less a river than
a sinuous lake encumbered with islets and sandbanks, and its navigable
channel winds capriciously between them, flowing with a strong and
steady current below the steep, black banks cut sheer through the
alluvial earth.

[Il