but it is now becoming scarce, and we are within
measurable distance of the time when its presence will be an exception
north of the first cataract. Willows are decreasing in number, and the
persea, one of the sacred trees of Ancient Egypt, is now only to be
found in gardens. None of the remaining tree species are common enough
to grow in large clusters; and Egypt, reduced to her lofty groves of
date-palms, presents the singular spectacle of a country where there is
no lack of trees, but an almost entire absence of shade.

[Illustration: 41.jpg SHE-ASS AND HER FOAL.]

If Egypt is a land of imported flora, it is also a land of imported
fauna, and all its animal species have been brought from neighbouring
countries. Some of these--as, for example, the horse and the camel--were
only introduced at a comparatively recent period, two thousand to
eighteen hundred years before our era; the camel still later. The
animals--such as the long and short-horned oxen, together with varieties
of goats and dogs--are, like the plants, generally of African origin,
and the ass of Egypt preserves an original purity of form and a vigour
to which the European donkey has long been a stranger. The pig and
the wild boar, the long-eared hare, the hedgehog, the ichneumon, the
moufflon, or maned sheep, innumerable gazelles, including the Egyptian
gazelles, and antelopes with lyre-shaped horns, are as much West Asian
as African, like the carnivors of all sizes, whose prey they are--the
wild cat, the wolf, the jackal, the striped and spotted hyenas, the
leopard, the panther, the hunting leopard, and the lion.

[Illustration: 042.jpg THE URAEUS OF EGYPT. 1]

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from pl. iii. of the Reptiles-
Supplement to the _Description de AEgypte_.

On the other hand, most of the serpents, large and small, are
indigenous. Some are harmless, like the colubers; others are venomous,
such as the soy tale, the cerastes, the haje viper, and the asp. The asp
was worshipped by the Egyptians under the name of uraeus. It occasionally
attains to a length of six and a half feet, and when approached will
erect its head and inflate its throat in readiness for darting forward.
The bite is fatal, like that of the cerastes; birds are literally struck
down by the strength of the poison, while the great mammals, and man
himself, almost invariably succumb to it after a longer or shorter
death-struggle. The uraeus is rarely found except in the desert