rne Cambyses to him; the conquest had thus
been merely a revenge of the legitimate heirs of Psammetichus upon the
usurper, and Cambyses had ascended the throne less as a conqueror than
as a Pharaoh of the line of Apries. It was by this childish fiction that
the Egyptians in their decadence consoled themselves before the stranger
for their loss of power. Always proud of their ancient prowess, but
incapable of imitating the deeds of their forefathers, they none the
less pretended that they could neither be vanquished nor ruled except
by one of themselves, and the story of Nitetis afforded complete
satisfaction to their vanity. If Cambyses were born of a solar princess,
Persia could not be said to have imposed a barbarian king upon Egypt,
but, on the contrary, that Egypt had cleverly foisted her Pharaoh upon
Persia, and through Persia upon half the universe.

One obstacle still separated the two foes--the desert and the marshes
of the Delta. The distance between the outposts of Pelusium and the
fortress of AEnysos* on the Syrian frontier was scarcely fifty-six miles,
and could be crossed by an army in less than ten days.** Formerly the
width of this strip of desert had been less, but the Assyrians, and
after them the Chaldaeans, had vied with each other in laying waste the
country, and the absence of any settled population now rendered the
transit difficult. Cambyses had his head-quarters at Gaza, at the
extreme limit of his own dominions,*** but he was at a loss how to face
this solitary region without incurring the risk of seeing half his men
buried beneath its sands, and his uncertainty was delaying his departure
when a stroke of fortune relieved him from his difficulty.

* The AEnysos of Herodotus is now Khan Yunes.

** In 1799, Napoleon's army left Kattiyeh on the 18th of
Pluviose, and was at Gaza on the 7th of Ventose, after
remaining from the 21st to the 30th of Pluviose before El-
Arish besieging that place.

*** This seems to follow from the tradition, according to
which Cambyses left his treasures at Gaza during the
Egyptian campaign, and the town was thence called _Gaza_,
"the treasury." The etymology is false, but the fact that
suggested it is probably correct, considering the situation
of Gaza and the part it must necessarily play in an invasion
of Egypt.

Phanes of Halicarnassus, one of the mercenaries in the service of Egypt,
a man of shrewd j