“Everything in Egypt,” says Miss Martineau,[50] with equal truth and eloquence, “life itself, and all that it includes, depends on the state of the unintermitting conflict between the Nile and the Desert. The world has seen many straggles; but no other so pertinacious, so perdurable, and so sublime as the conflict of these two great powers. The Nile, ever young, because perpetually renewing its youth, appears to the inexperienced eye to have no chance, with its stripling force, against the great old Goliath, the Desert, whose might has never relaxed from the earliest days till now; but the giant has not conquered it. Now and then he has prevailed for a season, and the tremblers whose destiny hung on the event have cried out that all was over; but he has once more been driven back, and Nilus has risen up again to do what we see him doing in the sculptures—bind up his water-plants about the throne of Egypt.”
The traveller, ascending the famous river which has so long been mixed up with an apparently insoluble geographical problem, sees the Desert everywhere present; its yellow boundary-line is vividly traced against the rich emerald-green of the fertile valley, and, as he advances, that line seems to draw nearer and nearer, until the cultivated soil appears reduced to a narrow strip on the river-bank. It has encroached upon many once prosperous and busy sites, and buried deeply the memorials of the old Egyptian civilization.
“Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Everywhere outside the valley of the Nile, I repeat, lies the Desert. West of the Arabian chain of heights stretch the vast sandy plains frequented by the Arab tribes of the Beni-Wassel and the Arabdé. Beyond the eastern chain spread the Libyan Deserts, which, in the remote distance, merge into the Great Sahara, and those of the Thebaïd, where the early Christian anchorites found a dismal asylum. Lower, to the south of Egypt, extend the Deserts of Lower Nubia.
Let us ascend the Nile as far as Korosko, on the right bank of the river, and cross the huge chain of rocky hills which separates the cultivated zone from the Desert to which the village just spoken of gives name. These hills, all of equal elevation, assume the form of truncated cones. They are layers of granite superimposed horizontally, and with a depth of colour which makes them resemble at the first glance masses of basalt. They are absolutely bare, and separated from each other by abrupt sinuous gorges, whose bottom is covered deep in sand of golden lights, brought from the desert on the wings of the south-west. Long streams of the same brilliant sand descend the slopes opposed to the direction of the wind with graceful undulations, which subside imperceptibly in the blown sand that carpets the floor of these mysterious valleys. The crests of the hills can only be distinguished by their different colours; some are lightly shaded with gray, others with blue or green, and others again with rose or crimson. The reflets of the setting sun on these uniform and many-coloured summits have a marvellous splendour, lighting up the scene until it assumes a fairy aspect,
“And all puts on a gentle hue,
Hanging in the shadowy air,
Like a picture rich and rare.”
At certain times it would rather remind the spectator of another of Coleridge’s conceptions:
“A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”[51]
Yet the spectacle is generally one of a rare and peculiar loveliness. “If nature,” says M. Trémaux,[52] “had invested with this kind of beauty our verdurous fields of the West, they would have been veritable Edens; but to produce, blend, and harmonize these inimitable hues, it requires, under the last beams of the sun, the emanations from the heated sands and those which the day has called into existence from the burning surfaces of the denuded rocks. It is by the side of her greatest horrors nature places her grandest beauties.”
The horror of the Desert does not lie only in its aridity, in its vacuity—this vacuity is not absolute; in default of life, Death peoples its solitudes. The glens or gorges frequented by the caravans are lined with stones, symmetrically disposed at certain intervals. These stones mark the places where rest the remains of the hapless pilgrims who have attempted to cross the wilderness, and perished in the attempt. Round and about each rugged tomb lie the skeletons of animals which none have troubled themselves to bury in the sand. Frequently you may see, on the sandy wastes of Africa, or the desolate plains of Asia and the New World, these carcasses laid out in two interminable rows; indicating the gloomy track which should be followed by the traveller, and never failing to remind him of the tribute Death levies upon mankind in these accursed regions. Thus does the Desert show itself more relentless than even the hungry ocean, which at least devours its victims whole, and affronts the eye with no traces of its murders. But the Moloch of the Desert has no shame; it cynically exposes the hideous remains of those whom it has killed; it strews the earth with their bones; it has its museums of skeletons, or rather of preserved animals.