Predecessors of Cleopatra.
CHAPTER FIRST.
THE BLACK LAND.
Kem, “the Black Land,” in hieroglyphic, or Kemi, in the later and more familiar demotic, was so called from its dark and fruitful soil, a loam, which turned up freshly, after a recent inundation of the Nile, has, as one traveller describes it, “a brown and velvety lustre.”
Through it winds and flows the great river of which Homer speaks as “Egypt’s Heaven descended stream” and that more than any other has set its stamp upon the country and its inhabitants. So potent for weal or woe is it that one scarce wonders it was worshipped as a deity, and the Arabs call it “El Bahari,” the sea. It is difficult to find the word travel in their language, with the Egyptian it is always up and down stream. From the river he drew the fish which formed part of his daily food, its fructifying waters, spreading over the land, called forth abundant harvests, and from the mud on its banks he built the hut in which he lived, or manufactured the bricks for the construction of his tomb or other more ambitious edifice. The rushes that grew beside it furnished his writing material, and its muddy or turbid water, as a beverage, had for him the charm of a crystal rill.
Leigh Hunt says of the Nile:
“It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;
And times and things as in that vision seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands.”
The Nile has been said to be less like a river than a sinuous lake with islands and sand-bars interspersed.