The sycamore and the date-palm, both importations from Central Africa, have better adapted themselves to their exile, and are now fully naturalized on Egyptian soil.
The sycamore grows in sand on the edge of the desert as vigorously as in the midst of a well-watered country. Its roots go deep in search of water, which infiltrates as far as the gorges of the hills, and they absorb it freely, even where drought seems to reign supreme. The heavy, squat, gnarled trunk occasionally attains to colossal dimensions, without ever growing very high. Its rounded masses of compact foliage are so wide-spreading that a single tree in the distance may give the impression of several grouped together; and its shade is dense, and impenetrable to the sun. A striking contrast to the sycamore is presented by the date-palm. Its round and slender stem rises uninterruptedly to a height of thirteen to sixteen yards; its head is crowned with a cluster of flexible leaves arranged in two or three tiers, but so scanty, so pitilessly slit, that they fail to keep off the light, and cast but a slight and unrefreshing shadow. Few trees have so elegant an appearance, yet few are so monotonously elegant. There are palm trees to be seen on every hand; isolated, clustered by twos and threes at the mouths of ravines and about the villages, planted in regular file along the banks of the river like rows of columns, symmetrically arranged in plantations,—these are the invariable background against which other trees are grouped, diversifying the landscape. The feathery tamarisk[*] and the nabk, the moringa, the carob, or locust tree several varieties of acacia and mimosa-the sont, the mimosa habbas, the white acacia, the Acacia Parnesxana—and the pomegranate tree, increase in number with the distance from the Mediterranean.
* The Egyptian name for the tamarisk, asari, asri, is
identical with that given to it in Semitic languages, both
ancient and modern. This would suggest the question
whether the tamarisk did not originally come from Asia. In
that case it must have been brought to Egypt from remote
antiquity, for it figures in the Pyramid texts. Bricks of
Nile mud, and Memphite and Theban tombs have yielded us
leaves, twigs, and even whole branches of the tamarisk.
1 From a drawing by Boudier, from a photograph by Insinger,
taken in 1884.
The dry air of the valley is marvellously suited to them, but makes the tissue of their foliage hard and fibrous, imparting an aerial aspect, and such faded tints as are unknown to their growth in other climates. The greater number of these trees do not reproduce themselves spontaneously, and tend to disappear when neglected. The Acacia Seyal, formerly abundant by the banks of the river, is now almost entirely confined to certain valleys of the Theban desert, along with a variety of the kernelled dôm-palm, of which a poetical description has come down to us from the Ancient Egyptians. The common dôm-palm bifurcates at eight or ten yards from the ground; these branches are subdivided, and terminate in bunches of twenty to thirty palmate and fibrous leaves, six to eight feet long. At the beginning of this century the tree was common in Upper Egypt, but it is now becoming scarce, and we are within measurable distance of the time when its presence will be an exception north of the first cataract. Willows are decreasing in number, and the persea, one of the sacred trees of Ancient Egypt, is now only to be found in gardens. None of the remaining tree species are common enough to grow in large clusters; and Egypt, reduced to her lofty groves of date-palms, presents the singular spectacle of a country where there is no lack of trees, but an almost entire absence of shade.