THE NILE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2104, 21 June 1894, Page 42

THE NILE.

When th 6 Nile attains its extreme height, which is generally about September, the country presents a curious spectacle. becomes a great lake. From the desert borders on one side to the desert borders on the other; the flood extends.

The Pyramids of Gizeh, those great pyramids which ordinarily stand six or seven miles from the river, cast their gigantic reflections far over the placid waters which lip the sand at their base.

The villages, which invariably stand on elevated pieces of ground, are isolated one from the another, and surrounded by their palm groves, look like the coral islands of the Pacific.

The suburbs of the towns even are flooded, and only a few embanked roads still rise above the surface.

Almost all communication has to be carried on by means of boats.

For awhile the tilling of tho soil, the libours of shadoof and eakiyeh, are at an end; and tbo fellah, gathering his stock about him, waits in thankfulness for the departure of the waters and the reappearance of the soil, invigorated and fertilised by the mud, the annual gift of the river.

D wellers in the north have no conception how quickly and with what exuberance that soil, freed from the water and exposed to the fervour of an African sun, responds to the call made upon it.

Last week, it lay a mass of dark chocolatecoloured mud.

To day, the wheat shoots upward from it, and, viewed from a distance, it grows green already.

The common boat of the Nile is called a dahabeah.

With its short mast and long boom and huge white wing -like sails, it is one of the most graceful boats to be seen, and contrives, as it glides up-stream, to add a beauty to even the longest and dullest stretches of the river. — Stanley J. Weyma.n.