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Egypt Before the Time Of: Asiri

Beyond that line, marshes whose extent has earned them the title of lakes, and moving sands, are forever renewing with the fertility of the soil, and the cultivation bestowed upon it, the antique struggle between the two brothers Typhon and Asiri.* Then, behind that second zone, a wide plain, almost level with the water and intersected by numerous canals, extends toward the south, gradually narrowing as it goes, up to the point where these canals and the river which feeds them diverge in a triangle toward the sea. This river is the Nile : this plain is its Delta, a tract periodically submerged for three months at a time, by the waters that have formed it," a carpeting of verdure, of flowers and * This we think is the more exact spelling of the classic Osiris. Asiri = Asura, one of the oldest titles employed by man to designate God. See E. Burnouf's Commentary on the Yaena: and Jean Reynaud's study on Zoroaster. of rich harvests from November until March,-a cracked and burning soil, laden with a black, impalpable dust during the remainder of the year," says Amrou in a letter to the Caliph Omar. At the apex of the Delta, the horizon ascends and gradually contracts from the southeast toward the west. At that point, the crests of the hills which, all the way from the ridges of Upper Africa, shut in the narrow valley of the Nile between their parallel chains and shelter it from the continually threatening invasions of the deserts that it crosses, subside and are at length lost beneath the sand.

At the foot of the Mokattan, the last broad slope of the Arabian chain, stretches the modern city of Cairo. Nearly opposite, on the left bank of the river, a salient angle of the Libyan chain serves as a pedestal to the eternal pyramids whose gigantic shadows the setting sun flings far over the groves of palm trees that now cover the space where Memphis stood. "Placed at the entrance of the valley of the Nile," says Chateaubriand in Les Martyrs, "they look like the mourning portals of Egypt, or rather like some triumphal monument reared to Death to commemorate his victories. Pharaoh is there with all his people, and their sepulchres are around him!"