Predecessors of Cleopatra

by Leigh North

The sacred name of the Nile was “Hapi, the Concealed.” The early Egyptians believed that its source was in fountains, bottomless and far away, and the tears of the goddess Isis caused its ebb and flow. The explorations of comparatively modern travellers have solved the mystery of its being, and to-day we know that it springs from great lakes which their discoverers named respectively, Victoria and Albert Nyanza.

Of the three great rivers, the Nile, the Mississippi, and the Amazon, the first is the longest, the second has the largest number of ramifications, and the third the greatest volume of water.

A Nilometer, a pillar standing in a pit, chronicles the rise of the tide, and great festivities attended the opening of the canals which were dug in all directions to carry its beneficent stream. A human victim was sacrificed to appease the river god. A young girl was each year dedicated to this purpose. Bound to a stake, adorned with flowers, and hailed as “Aruseh, the bride of the Nile,” she stood and watched the on-coming flood which was to shut out for her the light of day. Perhaps it was in the terror with which the bounding pulses of youth must ever regard the great Destroyer. Perhaps with the heroic spirit of a martyr she awaited her fate, glorying in it and giving herself up a willing sacrifice, as the Hindoo woman is said occasionally to have done in the Suttee, when she cast herself on the funeral pile of her husband.

It was a Mohammedan general who put an end to this annual tragedy and refused to permit the usual offering. The river delayed its rising, and the murmurs of the people waxed loud against him. In this dilemma he appealed to the Kadlif Omar, he who destroyed the Alexandria library, saying that if it agreed with the Koran it was useless to preserve it, and if it differed it was pernicious. But in this matter he showed himself larger-minded. He obligingly wrote a letter which was cast into the water and ran thus: A. D. 640, “From Abd Allah Omar, Prince of the Faithful, to the Nile of Egypt. If thou flow of thine own accord, flow not, but if it be Allah, the One, the Mighty, who causeth thee to flow, then we implore Him to make thee flow.”

The prayer was successful and the inundation began. Henceforth a mud pillar, originally no doubt in human form, and still called “the Bride of the Nile,” was substituted for a trembling maiden, and melted away before the encroaching stream. At the inundation the land looks like a marsh, the towns, etc., being just above the level of the water, and even now the crier announces the rise of the current.

The juncture of the White and Blue Nile shows the difference in the tint of the water for some time after. The Nile has no tides. The dews are heavy in Lower Egypt and the nights cool and refreshing, while the temperature is, as a rule, most agreeable. From the low, long, level shore and with a coast line much the same as three thousand years ago, we follow the river through a fertile valley, which in time narrows between mountains and table-lands of sand. At the cataracts the stream surges and swells round little rocky islands and the rapids cause navigation to be difficult if not dangerous.

The Delta, so called from its resemblance to the Greek letter, is a level plain, highly cultivated, varied by lofty dark brown, ancient mounds, on which villages are often built, surrounded by palm trees. The Greeks and Romans divided Egypt into the Delta, or Lower Egypt, and the Thebaid or Upper. The rocks are generally of limestone, till one reaches Thebes, and then they are of sandstone, while at the first Cataract red granite bursts through the sandstone. The granite is yellowish or reddish, with no vegetation on the rocks. The drifts of yellow sand are everywhere. In some parts the mountains are three hundred feet high, and at Thebes they rise to four times that height. On the eastern side they are close to the water, while on the western they are further from the edge. What is called the Fayum is a fertile tract in the hollow of the desert, while at the furthest extremity is a lake of brackish water.

Upper Egypt is bounded by mountains, through which the river has cut its way, their height overshadowing it, but not rising into sharp peaks. It is narrow and cultivated. From the mouth of the Nile to the first cataract is six hundred miles of fertile valley, and it is said that the scenery of the first cataract resembles nothing but that of the second.

The beauty of Egypt is in its coloring. The small proportion of green is compensated for by its intensity. Over the velvet soil hangs a sky of turquoise blue, the sand sparkles like precious stones and the clear air is luminous. “The land where it is always afternoon” might almost be named the golden land. The traveller with the poetic or enthusiastic temperament revels in the delicate variety of its hues. He sees the sun turning the sands to gold, the river reflecting the sky, the blue lotus blossoms and the reeds, the picturesque buffaloes standing in the water with sleepy blue eyes and the vivid green of wheat fields. Another describes the rusty gold of the Libyan rocks, the paler hue of the driven sand slopes, the warm mauve of the nearer Pyramid, which from a distance is a tender rose, like the bloom of an apricot, in delicate tone against the sky. Low on the horizon, soft and pearly tints, blue and luminous at the zenith, while opalescent shadows, pale blue and violet and greenish grey, nestle in the hollows of the rocks and curves of the sand drifts. Lakelike plains, with palm groves and corn flats, relieve the glowing distance. Even in the moonlight one seems to see the color.

From the top of the Pyramids the valley of the Nile looks like a carpet of rich green, the groves of palm trees like figures woven in deeper tints. Another speaks of the palms as sculptured in jasper and malachite against the rosy evening sky.