; it was to Zalu they returned
triumphant after the campaign, and there, at the gates of the town,
they were welcomed by the magnates of the kingdom. The road ran for some
distance over a region which was covered by the inundation of the Nile
during six months of the year; it then turned eastward, and for some
distance skirted the sea-shore, passing between the Mediterranean
and the swamp which writers of the Greek period called the Lake of
Sirbonis.*

* The Sirbonian Lake is sometimes half full of water,
sometimes almost entirely dry; at the present time it bears
the name of Sebkhat Berdawil, from King Baldwin I. of
Jerusalem, who on his return from his Egyptian campaign died
on its shores, in 1148, before he could reach El-Artsh.

[Illustration: 177.jpg THE FORTRESS AND BRIDGE OF ZALU]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Insinger.

This stage of the journey was beset with difficulties, for the Sirbonian
Lake did not always present the same aspect, and its margins were
constantly shifting. When the canals which connected it with the open
sea happened to become obstructed, the sheet of water subsided from
evaporation, leaving in many places merely an expanse of shifting
mud, often concealed under the sand which the wind brought up from the
desert. Travellers ran imminent risk of sinking in this quagmire,
and the Greek historians tell of large armies being almost entirely
swallowed up in it. About halfway along the length of the lake rose the
solitary hill of Mount Casios; beyond this the sea-coast widened till
it became a vast slightly undulating plain, covered with scanty herbage,
and dotted over with wells containing an abundant supply of water,
which, however, was brackish and disagreeable to drink.

[Illustration: 178.jpg Map]

Beyond these lay a grove of palms, a brick prison, and a cluster of
miserable houses, bounded by a broad wady, usually dry. The bed of the
torrent often served as the boundary between Africa and Asia, and
the town was for many years merely a convict prison, where ordinary
criminals, condemned to mutilation and exile, were confined; indeed, the
Greeks assure us that it owed its name of Rhinocolura to the number of
noseless convicts who were to be seen there.*

* The ruins of the ancient town, which were of considerable
extent, are half buried under the sand, out of which an
Egyptian naos of the Ptolemaic period has been dug, and