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PART II
COUNTRY LIFE ROUND CAIRO
CHAPTER XXIX
On the Humours of the Desert
" '' I ^HE desert; there is nothing in it," said my witty
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friend R. H. S., and he was right or wrong according
as you take it— I mean the desert. If you are trying to strike
a bee-line across it to an oasis, or as Baird's army crossed
it, in their famous march to join Abercromby, who had
already won the victory which terminated the French occupation
of Egypt, and was dead, R. H. S. was right. You
might never see a living thing, and hardly a trace of human
interference, except the bones of a camel which had died by
the way. But from another point of view he was hopelessly
wrong ; all the monuments of Ancient Egypt are in, or just
on the edge of, the desert, for the builders had to keep above
the inundation level of the Nile ; and every acre which is not
flooded or irrigated is desert.
Observed from the deck of a luxurious Cook's steamer
running up the Nile on a pleasure-trip, the desert is a thing of
infinite and innumerable beauties; you can see something of
it on both sides nearly all the time. The strip of cultivated
land which constitutes Egypt is mighty narrow, and it is
bounded by the Arabian hills on one side and the Libyan hills
on the other, both of which are sheer unredeemed desert—hot
boulders sticking out of hot sand, which take on the loveliest
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