The whole place is called the Pasture of the Egyptians, about the which is a lowe valley, which receiveth certaine exundations of Nylus, by means whereof it becometh a poole, and is in the midst very deepe, about the brimmes whereof are marishes or fennes. For looke, as the shore is to the Sea, such is the Fennes to every great Poole. In that place have the theeves of Egypt, how many soever they bee, their common wealth. And for as much as there is a little land without the water, some live in small cottages, others in boates which they use as wel for their house as for passage over the poole. In these doe their women serve them, and if need require, be also brought to bedde. When a child is borne first, they let him suck his mother’s milk a while, but after they feede him with fishes taken in the lake and roasted in the hot sunne. And when they perceive that he beginnes to goe, they tie a cord about his legs, and suffer him but onely to goe about the boate.... Moreover the great plenty of reede that groweth there in the moozy ground is in a manner as good as a bulwark to them. For by devising many crooked and cumbrous wayes, through which the passage to them by oft use is very easie, but to others hard, they have made it as a sure defence, that by no sudden invasion they may be endammaged.
A FEN FISHERMAN.
Yet once there were towns in this sodden land, which raised not only corn to stay the hunger of Rome, but vines and olives. Some two score mounds, covering as many towns, rise out of the maze of irrigation channels and choked drains, and you may see still the bed-stones of oil-presses and faint traces of ridge and furrow on higher lying patches. It is a mystery how men ever lived and tilled in a land, whither one would surely say
no man comes
Nor hath come since the making of the world.
For they had no pumps, those husbandmen of the Roman time, and their drainage must have been by natural flow. Has all the Delta sunk slowly since their day, even as its shore has plainly been sinking at Alexandria ever since those Ptolemaic buildings, which are now awash in the eastern bay, were built high and dry on Lechaeum?
Even on the margin of the great northern lagoons, where Heliodorus’ ichthyophagi still survive, you can ride nowhere far without happening on ancient tracks of civilised man. Basins hollowed for flat-bottomed shipping, and silted canals with broken dykes, mock again and again your sanguine essay of a bee-line to some far seen Tell. Arrived at last, after many a false turn and lure of cheating mirage, you will find no imposing ruin; for in this region builders used little except brick, and the most of it adobe. But the surface will be seen strewn with vitreous slags, left by Arabs, who have burnt what stone there was for lime; with fragments of iridescent glass, that vies with the green hues of copper scraps and coins; with sherds of crumbling blue faience and red earthenware. It is meagre loot after so much toil through bog and soapy sand; nor is much more to be got by digging at a venture. The mounds are made mostly of little adobe houses, piled one on another, and rotted through and through with salt; and below these, if you are hopeful enough to dig, you will pass through some feet of empty sand, compressed to the consistency of asphalt, only to find at the bottom a core of black Nile mud, heaped by the first builders to raise their town above the damp of the surrounding flats. Now and again the newly come natives, who dig in these mounds for the nitrous earth, which exists on all ancient sites by the Nile, or for ready-made bricks, have turned up drums or capitals of small columns, an inscription or two, or even a Roman sculpture—trophies all of an Empire, under whose rule Egypt was more widely tilled than even at this day. But these are rare rewards.
The lagoons lie farther yet, and, if you would see them well, you must sail before the summer heats down one of the greater canals of the Delta in a boat of the lightest draught. The last lock is left far behind, and you pass beyond all hamlets into an amphibious Limbo where no life of man abides. The canal has no longer dykes on either hand, and its rims sink below your gunwale. Drop down a mile or two more. The flood brims bank high, and slops on to the flats, and, before you are well aware, the Nile land has slid under its own waters. You are out on a Lagoon, boundless and bottomless to all appearance, so low are its shores, and so turbid its harassed waves. Yet, in fact, when a tall man lets himself down in mid-lake, the ripples hardly wash his breast.
