THROUGH OLD EGYPT TO CAIRO flowed the great broad-bosomed Nile, the mother of the land of Egypt, whose earth-laden waters have been creating soil throughout the ages, and which to-day are still its source of life.

Egypt, in the words of Herodotus, is the gift of the Nile. This whole rainless country was once a bed of sterile sand so bleak and bare that not a blade of grass nor a shrub of cactus would grow upon it. This mighty river, rising in the heights of Africa and cutting its way through rocks and hills, has brought down enough sediment to form the tillable area of Egypt. South of Cairo, for nearly a thou¬ sand miles along its banks, there extends a strip of rich black earth which is only from three to nine miles wide.

Below the city the land spreads out in a delta shaped somewhat like the segment of a circle, the radii of which jut out from Cairo, while the blue waters of the Mediter¬ ranean edge its arc. This narrow strip and fan form the arable land of Egypt. The soil is nowhere more than thirty-five feet deep. It rests on a bed of sand. On each side of it are vast wastes of sand and rock, with not a spot of green to relieve the ceaseless glare of the sun. The green goes close to the edge of the desert, where it stops as abruptly as though it were cut off by a gardener. Nearly everywhere up the Nile from Cairo the strip is so narrow that you can stand at one side of the valley and see clear across it.

Thus, in one sense, Egypt is the leanest country in the world, but it is the fattest in the quality of the food that nature gives it. Through the ages it has had one big meal every year. At the inundation of the Nile, for several months the waters spread over the land and were allowed to stand there until they dropped the rich, black fertilizing 23