CAIRO TO KISUMU who have settled in the country become, in the course of a few generations, just like the Egyptians themselves. Scientists say that the Egyptian peasantry of to-day is the same as in the past, and that this is true even of the cattle. Different breeds have been imported from time to time only to change into the Egyptian type, and the cow to-day is the same as that pictured in the hiero¬ glyphics of the tombs made thousands of years ago. The Egyptian cow is like the Jersey in shape and form save that its neck is not quite so delicate and its horns are a trifle shorter. Its colour is a rich red. Its milk is full of oil, and its butter is yellow. It has been asserted that the Jersey cow originally came from Egypt, and was taken to the Island of Jersey by the Phoenicians in some of their voyages ages ago.

But to return to the Nile, the source of existence of this great population. Next to the Mississippi, with the Mis¬ souri, it is the longest river of the world. The geographers put its length at from thirty-seven hundred to four thou¬ sand miles. It is a hundred miles or so longer than the Amazon, and during the last seventeen hundred miles of its course not a single branch comes in to add to its volume.

For most of the way it flows through a desert of rock and sand as dry as the Sahara. In the summer many of the winds that sweep over Cairo are like the blast from a furnace, and in Upper Egypt a dead dog thrown into the fields will turn to dust without an offensive odour. The dry air sucks the moisture out of the carcass so that there is no corruption.

Nearly all of the cultivated lands lie along the Nile banks and depend for their supply of water on the rise of the river, caused by the rains in the region around its sources. When 26