EGYPT.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 50, 12 December 1891, Page 673

EGYPT.

It is only of Egypt that one can say the country can be seen in its length and breadth from the deck of a vessel making a straight course. Egypt, familiar as it is to us, we hardly realise until we see it, is merely the valley of the Nile, which averages but two and a half miles wide on either bank. As the boat climbs the Nile against its three or four mile current from Cairo to the farthest point south that Tewfik Pasha can pretend to govern, or upon which he can levy tribute, the whole land can be spanned by the eye from our deck, and the present life and past monuments be seen by short excursions from our daily moorings. Egypt, too, is a land not modern, though it exists, not complex nor of various aspects. It lived and led the world when life was simple. When life began to demand more variety it lagged behind, and now, when life is not supposed to be worth living without the utmost diversity and cosmopolitanism, Egypt, unable to afford but unity, drops back into something hardly of this world, almost prehistoric. It has no diversity of industries, contains no stirring population set one against the other by many and divergent in-*

terests. It offers to the eye neither in landscape nor in architecture a variety suggestive of different ideas of beauty. The climate dictates imperiously but one mode of life. The Nile gives the inhabitants their soil and distributes it impartially and with chemical consistency from one end of Egypt to the other. It offers one mode of carriage to all, and even at this day there is but one railway for a few miles on the left bank, running its trains about the speed of the Nile current. It would seem that these old lands in the East have had their day, because our day demands a cos mopolitanism that they never have been able to give birth to or sustain. Even in population they seem unable to grow a modern city, a London or a Paris, that is. an unpatriotic mixture of every nation and temperament and of every phase of life. Few foreign children are born there, and almost none at all reach maturity. When foreign blood is mixed with the Egyptian it is said to fade out of all effect in a generation or two and the old Egyptian blood is again pure. This is said to be the cause of the retention by the present Egyptian of so many of the traits of the men who figure in the ancient art on tomb and temple, in spite of what would ordinarily be almost overwhelming admixture of blood in the many invasions and conquests Egypt has suffered. Neither the villages nor the cities like Cairo and Alexandria have the least of the modern spirit, and the country of the Nile is as undiversified as the mud of which it is made, which forms the land ami dictates its vegetable variety as it did 4,000 years ago.