r drier and more vibrating, and the green of
cultivation loses its brightness. The angular outline of the dom-palni
mingles more and more with that of the common palm and of the heavy
sycamore, and the castor-oil plant increasingly abounds. But all these
changes come about so gradually that they are effected before we notice
them. The plain continues to contract. At Thebes it is still ten miles
wide; at the gorge of Gebelen it has almost disappeared, and at Gebel
Silsileh it has completely vanished. There, it was crossed by a natural
dyke of sandstone, through which the waters have with difficulty scooped
for themselves a passage. From this point, Egypt is nothing but the bed
of the Nile lying between two escarpments of naked rock.

Further on the cultivable land reappears, but narrowed, and changed
almost beyond recognition. Hills, hewn out of solid sandstone, succeed
each other at distances of about two miles, low, crushed, sombre, and
formless. Presently a forest of palm trees, the last on that side,
announces Aswan and Nubia. Five banks of granite, ranged in lines
between latitude 24 deg. and 18 deg. N., cross Nubia from east to west, and from
north-east to south-west, like so many ramparts thrown up between the
Mediterranean and the heart of Africa. The Nile has attacked them from
behind, and made its way over them one after another in rapids which
have been glorified by the name of cataracts.

[Illustration: 014.jpg ENTRANCE TO THE FIRST CATARACT. 1]

1 View taken from the hills opposite Elephantine, by
Insinger, in 1884.

Classic writers were pleased to describe the river as hurled into the
gulfs of Syne with so great a roar that the people of the neighbourhood
were deafened by it. Even a colony of Persians, sent thither by
Cambyses, could not bear the noise of the falls, and went forth to seek
a quieter situation. The first cataract is a kind of sloping and sinuous
passage six and a quarter miles in length, descending from the island
of Philae to the port of Aswan, the aspect of its approach relieved and
brightened by the ever green groves of Elephantine. Beyond Elephantine
are cliffs and sandy beaches, chains of blackened "roches moutonnees"
marking out the beds of the currents, and fantastic reefs, sometimes
bare and sometimes veiled by long grasses and climbing plants, in
which thousands of birds have made their nests. There are islets
too, occasionally large enough to have once supported somethi