n be made to exist, there, we say, there is desert or sand-waste.
Land, without mud, has no economic value. To put it briefly, the only
parts of the world that count much for human habitation are the mud
deposits of the great rivers, and notably of the Nile, the Euphrates,
the Ganges, the Indus, the Irrawaddy, the Hoang Ho, the Yang-tse-Kiang;
of the Po, the Rhone, the Danube, the Rhine, the Volga, the Dnieper; of
the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Orinoco, the
Amazons, the La Plata. A corn-field is just a big mass of mud; and the
deeper and purer and freer from stones or other impurities it is the
better.

But England, you say, is not a great river-mud field; yet it supports
the densest population in the world. True; but England is an
exceptional product of modern civilization. She can't feed herself: she
is fed from Odessa, Alexandria, Bombay, New York, Montreal, Buenos
Ayres--in other words, from the mud fields of the Russian, the
Egyptian, the Indian, the American, the Canadian, the Argentine rivers.
Orontes, said Juvenal, has flowed into Tiber; Nile, we may say
nowadays, with equal truth, has flowed into Thames.

There is nothing to make one realize the importance of mud, indeed,
like a journey up Nile when the inundation is just over. You lounge on
the deck of your dahabieh, and drink in geography almost without
knowing it. The voyage forms a perfect introduction to the study of
mudology, and suggests to the observant mind (meaning you and me) the
real nature of mud as nothing else on earth that I know of can suggest
it. For in Egypt you get your phenomenon isolated, as it were, from all
disturbing elements. You have no rainfall to bother you, no local
streams, no complex denudation: the Nile does all, and the Nile does
everything. On either hand stretches away the bare desert, rising up in
grey rocky hills. Down the midst runs the one long line of alluvial
soil--in other words, Nile mud--which alone allows cultivation and life
in that rainless district. The country bases itself absolutely on mud.
The crops are raised on it; the houses and villages are built of it;
the land is manured with it; the very air is full of it. The crude
brick buildings that dissolve in dust are Nile mud solidified; the red
pottery of Assiout is Nile mud baked hard; the village mosques and
minarets are Nile mud whitewashed. I have even seen a ship's bulwarks
neatly repaired with mud. It pervades the whole land, when we