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The Monuments of Rameses The: Bahr-bela-ma

THE ANCIENT BED OF THE NILE, (p. 33.) To the westward of the Delta, parallel to its line of inclination and thirty-five miles distant, runs a valley that opens on the Mediterranean Sea not far from Arabs Cape. The name Bahr-bela-ma given by the wandering tribes to this valley signifies the river without water; it stretches far away toward the south and sends off many side valleys to the Nile below Gizeh, (the Bahr-el-Farigh,) and toward Fayoum. It is one of the singular features of the physical configuration of Northeastern Africa. A simple crest or ridge separates it from the Wadi-Natroun or the valley of the lakes of Natron, which no doubt was only one of its branches at the period when the waters rolled full and high between its banks fully 15,000 yards apart. The Bahr-bela-Ma is clogged with sand. Neither vegetation nor springs can be seen; APPENDIX. but, on the other hand there are such great quantities of petrified trunks of trees as are met with between the Mokattan and the Red Sea. Some of these trunks, completely transformed to stone, are as much as eight or ten yards in length. Impressions of fossil fish have also been noticed on the stone, and it has been ascertained that the pebbles picked up there belong to the primitive mountains of Upper Egypt and the high Ethiopian Plains. These petrifactions are to be found, also, in the Bahr-el-Farigh. Ascending southward across the Fayoum, the small oasis, the interior oasis and that of Khargeh, one may follow the traces of the Bahr-bela-ma to the bosom of the Nubian deserts as far as those wadys which, traversed by the roads leading to Darfur between the 20th and the 22nd degrees of latitude, seem to weld themselves to the most salient angles of the present bed of the Nile to the northward of Dongola. The Bahr-bela-ma is, then, but the old channel followed by the waters of the Ethiopian plateaux ere the convulsions of the crust of the earth had opened an outlet for them toward the primitive gulf which became Egypt, thanks to the local depressions of the surface.

IV.

THE SHEPHERD KING APAPSAS AND THE GOD SOUTEKH.

We read in Strabo that "at Heliopolis and Memphis there were edifices of a barbarian order of architecture, with several rows of columns, but with neither ornaments nor designs." Was not the temple reared to Soutekh, the only God, by the Semitic iconoclast Apapias, one of these edifices? Is it any other than the monument without ornament, without sculpture, without a single letter, discovered by M. Mariette twenty yards from the great Sphinx of Gizeh, and in which a well filled up with the statues of the gods and the kings of APPENDIX. the fourth dynasty, bears witness to the hatred of the founder for the idols and fetiches of the preceding generations ? V.