On the eastern horn of Aboukir Bay, on the Rosetta branch of the Nile, and about five miles from its mouth, lies the picturesque town of Rosetta. Its Arabic name is Rashid, an etymological coincidence which has induced some writers to jump to the conclusion that it is the birthplace of Haroun Al Rashid. To some persons no doubt the town would be shorn of much of its interest if dissociated from our old friend of “The Thousand and One Nights;” but the indisputable fact remains that Haroun Al Rashid died some seventy years before the foundation of the town in A. D. 870. Rosetta was a port of some commercial importance until the opening of the Mahmoudiyeh Canal in 1819 diverted most of its trade to Alexandria. The town is not devoid of architectural interest, and many fragments of ruins may be met with in the half-deserted streets, and marble pillars, which bear signs of considerable antiquity, may be noticed built into the doorways of the comparatively modern houses. One of the most interesting architectural features of Rosetta is the North Gate, flanked with massive towers of a form unusual in Egypt, each tower being crowned with a conical-shaped roof. Visitors will probably have noticed the curious gabled roofs and huge projecting windows of most of the houses. It was from these projecting doorways and latticed windows that such fearful execution was done to the British troops at the time of the ill-fated English expedition to Egypt in 1807. General Wauchope had been sent by General Fraser, who was in command of the troops, with an absurdly inadequate force of 1,200 men to take the strongly-garrisoned town. Mehemet Ali’s Albanian troops had purposely left the gates open in order to draw the English force into the narrow and winding streets. Their commander, without any previous examination, rushed blindly into the town with all his men. The Albanian soldiery waited till the English were confined in this infernal labyrinth of narrow, crooked streets, and then from every window and housetop rained down on them a perfect hail of musket-shot and rifle-ball. Before the officers could extricate their men from this terrible death-trap a third of the troops had fallen. Such was the result of this rash and futile expedition, which dimmed the lustre of their arms in Egypt, and contributed a good deal to the loss of their military prestige. That this crushing defeat should have taken place so near the scene of the most glorious achievement of their arms but a few years before, was naturally thought a peculiar aggravation of the failure of this ill-advised expedition.
To archæological students and Egyptologists Rosetta is a place of the greatest interest, as it was in its neighborhood that the famous inscribed stone was found which furnished the clue—sought in vain for so many years by Egyptian scholars—to the hieroglyphic writings of Egypt. Perhaps none of the archæological discoveries made in Egypt since the land was scientifically exploited by the savants attached to Napoleon’s expedition, not even that of the mummified remains of the Pharaohs, is more precious in the eyes of Egyptologists and antiquarians than this comparatively modern and ugly-looking block of black basalt, which now reposes in the Egyptian galleries of the British Museum. The story of its discovery is interesting. A certain Monsieur Bouchard, a French Captain of Engineers, while making some excavations at Fort St. Julien, a small fortress in the vicinity of Rosetta, discovered this celebrated stone in 1799. The interpretation of the inscription for many years defied all the efforts of the most learned French savants and English scholars, until, in 1822, two well-known Egyptologists, Champollion and Dr. Young, after independent study and examination, succeeded in deciphering that part of the inscription which was in Greek characters. From this they learnt that the inscription was triplicate and trilingual: one in Greek, the other in the oldest form of hieroglyphics, the purest kind of “picture-writing,” and the third in demotic characters—the last being the form of hieroglyphics used by the people, in which the symbols are more obscure than in the pure hieroglyphics used by the priests. The inscription, when finally deciphered, proved to be one of comparatively recent date, being a decree of Ptolemy V., issued in the year 196 B. C. The Rosetta stone was acquired by England as part of the spoils of war in the Egyptian expedition of 1801.
At Rosetta the railway leaves the coast and goes south to Cairo.
If the traveller wishes to see something of the agriculture of the Delta, he would get some idea of the astonishing fertility of the country by merely taking the train to Damanhour, the center of the cotton-growing district. The journey does not take more than a couple of hours. The passenger travelling by steamer from Alexandria to Port Said, though he skirts the coast, can see no signs of the agricultural wealth of Egypt, and for him the whole of Egypt might be an arid desert instead of one of the most fertile districts in the whole world. The area of cultivated lands, which, however, extends yearly seawards, is separated from the coast by a belt composed of strips of sandy desert, marshy plain, low sandhills, and salt lagunes, which varies in breadth from fifteen to thirty miles. A line drawn from Alexandria to Damietta, through the southern shore of Lake Boorlos, marks approximately the limit of cultivated land in this part of the Delta. The most unobservant traveller in Egypt cannot help perceiving that its sole industry is agriculture, and that the bulk of its inhabitants are tillers of the soil. Egypt seems, indeed, intended by nature to be the granary and market-garden of North Africa, and the prosperity of the country depends on its being allowed to retain its place as a purely agricultural country. The ill-advised, but fortunately futile, attempts which have been made by recent rulers to develop manufactures at the expense of agriculture, are the outcome of a short-sighted policy or perverted ambition. Experience has proved that every acre diverted from its ancient and rational use as a bearer of crops is a loss to the national wealth.
That “Egypt is the gift of the Nile” has been insisted upon with “damnable iteration” by every writer on Egypt, from Herodotus downwards. According to the popular etymology,[7] the very name of the Nile (Νεῖλος, from νέα ἰλὺς, new mud) testifies to its peculiar fertilizing properties. The Nile is all in all to the Egyptian, and can we wonder that Egyptian mythologists recognized in it the Creative Principle waging eternal warfare with Typhon, the Destructive Principle, represented by the encroaching desert? As Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole has well observed, “without the Nile there would be no Egypt; the great African Sahara would spread uninterruptedly to the Red Sea. Egypt is, in short, a long oasis worn in the rocky desert by the ever-flowing stream, and made green and fertile by its waters.”
At Cairo the Nile begins to rise about the third week in June, and the beginning of the overflow coincides with the heliacal rising of the Dog Star. The heavens have been called the clocks of the Ancients, and, according to some writers, it was the connection between the rise of the Nile and that of the Dog Star that first opened the way to the study of astronomy among the ancient Egyptians, so that not only was the Nile the creator of their country, but also of their science. The fellahs, however, still cherish a lingering belief in the supernatural origin of the overflow. They say that a miraculous drop of water falls into the Nile on the 17th of June, which causes the river to swell. Till September the river continues to rise, not regularly, but by leaps and bounds. In this month it attains its full height, and then gradually subsides till it reaches its normal height in the winter months.
As is well known, the quality of the harvest depends on the height of the annual overflow—a rise of not less than eighteen feet at Cairo being just sufficient, while a rise of over twenty-six feet, or thereabouts, would cause irreparable damage. It is a common notion that a very high Nile is beneficial; whereas an excessive inundation would do far more harm to the country than an abnormal deficiency of water. Statistics show conclusively that most of the famines in Egypt have occurred after an exceptionally high Nile. Shakespeare, who, we know, is often at fault in matters of natural science, is perhaps partly accountable for this popular error:—“The higher Nilus swells, the more it promises,” he makes Antony say, when describing the wonders of Egypt to Cæsar.
The coast between Rosetta and Port Said is, like the rest of the Egyptian littoral, flat and monotonous. The only break in the dreary vista is afforded by the picturesque-looking town of Damietta, which, with its lofty houses, looking in the distance like marble palaces, has a striking appearance seen from the sea. The town, though containing some spacious bazaars and several large and well-proportioned mosques, has little to attract the visitor, and there are no antiquities or buildings of any historic interest. The traveller, full of the traditions of the Crusades, who expects to find some traces of Saladin and the Saracens, will be doomed to disappointment. Damietta is comparatively modern, the old Byzantine city having been destroyed by the Arabs early in the thirteenth century, and rebuilt—at a safer distance from invasion by sea—a few miles inland, under the name of Mensheeyah. One of the gateways of the modern town, the Mensheeyah Gate, serves as a reminder of its former name. Though the trade of Damietta has, in common with most of the Delta sea-ports, declined since the construction of the Mahmoudiyeh Canal, it is still a town of some commercial importance, and consular representatives of several European powers are stationed here. To sportsmen Damietta offers special advantages, as it makes capital headquarters for the wild-fowl shooting on Menzaleh Lake, which teems with aquatic birds of all kinds. Myriads of wild duck may be seen feeding here, and “big game”—if the expression can be applied to birds—in the shape of herons, pelicans, storks, flamingoes, etc., is plentiful. In the marshes which abut on the lake, specimens of the papyrus are to be found, this neighborhood being one of the few habitats of this rare plant. Soon after rounding the projecting ridge of low sand-hills which fringe the estuary of the Damietta Branch of the Nile, the noble proportions of the loftiest lighthouse of the Mediterranean come into view. It is fitted with one of the most powerful electric lights in the world, its penetrating rays being visible on a clear night at a distance of over twenty-five miles. Shortly afterwards the forest of masts, apparently springing out of the desert, informs the passenger of the near vicinity of Port Said.
There is, of course, nothing to see at Port Said from a tourist’s standpoint. The town is little more than a large coaling station, and is of very recent growth. It owes its existence solely to the Suez Canal, and to the fact that the water at that part of the coast is deeper than at Pelusium, where the isthmus is narrowest. The town is built partly on artificial foundations on the strip of low sand-banks which forms a natural sea-wall protecting Lake Menzaleh from the Mediterranean. In the autumn at high Nile it is surrounded on all sides by water. An imaginative writer once called Port Said the Venice of Africa—not a very happy description, as the essentially modern appearance of this coaling station strikes the most unobservant visitor. The comparison might for its inappositeness rank with the proverbial one between Macedon and Monmouth. Both Venice and Port Said are land-locked, and that is the only feature they have in common.