THE CAUCASIAN RACE IN ETHIOPIA. 237 Northern India and the regions about Cashmere, as the Egyptians are supposed to have been, or, like the Beni Koreish at a later period, crossed over from the Arabian Peninsula, is not so easily determined. The theory of Pococke and other scholars, based on the presumed antiquity of Meroe, that here was the first dawning on African soil of that earliest Indian Civilization, which afterwards culminated at Memphis and Thebes, is overthrown ; but we have what is of still greater significance — the knowledge that the highest Civilization, in every age of the world, has been developed by the race to which we belong.

I walked slowly back to the boat, over the desolate plain, striving to create from those shapeless piles of ruin the splendor of which they were once a part. The sun, and the wind, and the mountains, and the Nile, were what they had ever been ; but where the kings and priests of Meroe walked in the pomp of their triumphal processions, a poor, submissive peasant knelt before me with a gourd full of goat's milk ; and if I had asked him when that plain had been inhabited, he would have answered me, like Chidhar, the Prophet : "As thou seest it now, so has it been for ever ! " the east of the Nile, and the Abyssinian nations, were in former times probably even more distinctly separated from the negroes «2ian new, and belonged to the Caucasian Race "