Many quarries likewise no doubt remain still undiscovered
and unexplored in this neighbourhood. We found the mountains worked
more or less down as far as Ramadeh; and inscriptions and sculptures,
evidently dating from very ancient times, are met with in many.

The people who inhabit the villages and hamlets of this district are
not all fellahs; indeed, I question whether, properly speaking, any
members of that humble race are to be found here. Their place is
supplied by Bedawin Arabs of the Ababde tribe, who have, to a certain
extent, abjured their wandering habits, and settled down on the
borders of a narrow piece of land given to them by the Nile. The
villages of Rasras and Fares, above the pass on the western bank, and
of El-Hamam below, as well as the more extensive and better-favoured
establishment of Silwa, with its little plain, are all peopled by men
of the same race. With the exception of El-Hamam, which has a
territory only a few feet wide, the cultivable land belonging to each
village seems adequate to its support. They have a few small groves of
palms; had just harvested some fair-sized dhourra-fields when we were
last there; and had some fields of the castor-oil plant. Perhaps
cultivation might be extended; a good deal of ground that seemed
fitted for spade or plough was overrun with a useless but beautiful
shrub called the silk-tree. Its pod, which, when just ripe, has a
blush that might rival that on the cheek of a maiden, was beginning to
wither and shrivel in the sun, and opening to scatter flakes of a
silky substance finer than the thistle's beard, leaving bare the
myriad seeds arranged something like a pine-cone.

I have called the plant useless, because vain have been the attempts
made to apply its produce to manufacturing purposes; but Arab mothers
procure from the stem a poisonous milky substance, with which they
sometimes blind their infants, to save them in after-life from the
conscription. How strangely love is corrupted in its manifestations by
the influence of tyranny! I have seen youths who have exhibited a foot
or a hand totally disabled and shrivelled up, and who boasted that
their mothers, in passionate tenderness and solicitude for them, had
thrust their young limbs into the fire, that they might retain their
presence through war, though maimed and rendered almost incapable of
work.

Few plants or trees of any value grow here spontaneously. The pretty
shrub called el-egl droops beneat