een to sixteen yards; its head
is crowned with a cluster of flexible leaves arranged in two or three
tiers, but so scanty, so pitilessly slit, that they fail to keep off the
light, and cast but a slight and unrefreshing shadow. Few trees have so
elegant an appearance, yet few are so monotonously elegant. There are
palm trees to be seen on every hand; isolated, clustered by twos and
threes at the mouths of ravines and about the villages, planted
in regular file along the banks of the river like rows of columns,
symmetrically arranged in plantations,--these are the invariable
background against which other trees are grouped, diversifying the
landscape. The feathery tamarisk[*] and the nabk, the moringa, the
carob, or locust tree several varieties of acacia and mimosa-the sont,
the mimosa habbas, the white acacia, the Acacia Parnesxana--and
the pomegranate tree, increase in number with the distance from the
Mediterranean.

* The Egyptian name for the tamarisk, _asari, asri_, is
identical with that given to it in Semitic languages, both
ancient and modern. This would suggest the question
whether the tamarisk did not originally come from Asia. In
that case it must have been brought to Egypt from remote
antiquity, for it figures in the Pyramid texts. Bricks of
Nile mud, and Memphite and Theban tombs have yielded us
leaves, twigs, and even whole branches of the tamarisk.

[Illustration: 40.jpg ACACIAS AT THE ENTRANCE TO A GARDEN OUTSIDE
EKHMIM. 1]

1 From a drawing by Boudier, from a photograph by Insinger,
taken in 1884.

The dry air of the valley is marvellously suited to them, but makes the
tissue of their foliage hard and fibrous, imparting an aerial aspect,
and such faded tints as are unknown to their growth in other climates.
The greater number of these trees do not reproduce themselves
spontaneously, and tend to disappear when neglected. The Acacia Seyal,
formerly abundant by the banks of the river, is now almost entirely
confined to certain valleys of the Theban desert, along with a variety
of the kernelled dom-palm, of which a poetical description has come
down to us from the Ancient Egyptians. The common dom-palm bifurcates at
eight or ten yards from the ground; these branches are subdivided, and
terminate in bunches of twenty to thirty palmate and fibrous leaves, six
to eight feet long. At the beginning of this century the tree was
common in Upper Egypt,