orientalcairocit00sladuoft

On the Humours of the Desert 309
horned viper of Egypt, which killed the superb Cleopatra, and
which Nature has clothed in the colour of the desert, keeps
near its edges ; the birds of the air as well as the reptiles
under the earth dread its depths. We did not see one bird
as we were crossing the desert to the Great Oasis.
The mineral world is not so chary. Not only does the
desert abound in valuable quarries—there are portions of it
like this very portion which I have been describing, which
abound in mines worked by the ancients for gold and man-
ganese and flints and the precious cobalt.
The true desert has no vegetation. The border plants are
the gigantic spurge, which bears the refreshing-looking but
hollow Dead Sea Fruit, and the Bitter Apple, a gourd whose
vine dies away in the heat, leaving golden fruit, like sugar
melons, on the sand.
Any vegetation beyond this indicates the presence of water ;
and where there is water there is no true desert. The desert
would run down to the Nile for nearly its entire course, were
it not that, within reach of the Nile, it can almost always be
cultivated, if it is only with castor-oil plants.
The desert is Nature's paint-box. Round the Great Oasis
you find all manner of stones, hued like the rainbow, which
grind up into the paints used by the ancient Egyptian in
frescoing his miles of tombs and acres of temples.
It seems verily that the desert is only a deserted place, for
Captain Young, late Governor of Haifa, has discovered that
with some surface-shifting and well-sinking the whole desert
between Haifa and Khartum could be put under crops.
There is water between fifty and sixty feet of the surface.
I am not so surprised at that, for it is a nice, genial-looking
desert, with the same sort of sands as you get at Paignton or
Tenby, decoratively backgrounded with pyramids (as at
Meravvi—the ancient Meroe) or mountains that look like
pyramids.
But the desert you pass in going to the Oasis is a real
savage bandit of a desert, with fierce cliffs, overwhelming
waves of sand, and plains of alkali white as the snow and
Salter than the sea. At first it is mild-looking enough, with