The first traveller in Egypt of which we have any record is Herodotus; he sums up, in an often quoted phrase, the impression which that land of wonders made upon him: "Egypt," he says, "is a present from the Nile."[37] The truth could not be better expressed. "Had the equatorial rains not been compelled to win for themselves a passage to the Mediterranean, a passage upon which they deposited the mud which they had accumulated on their long journey, Egypt would not have existed. Egypt began by being the bed of a torrent; the soil was raised by slow degrees ... man appeared there when, by the slow accumulation of fertile earth, the country at last became equal to his support...."[38] [37] HERODOTUS, ii. 7. [38] MARIETTE, _Itineraire de la haute Égypte_, p. 10 (edition of 1872, 1 vol. Alexandria, Mourès). Other rivers do no more than afford humidity for their immediate borders, or, in very low-lying districts, for a certain narrow stretch of country on each hand. When they overflow their banks it is in a violent and irregular fashion, involving wide-spread ruin and destruction. Great floods are feared as public misfortunes. It is very different with the Nile. Every year, at a date which can be almost exactly foretold, it begins to rise slowly and to spread gently over the land. It rises by degrees until its surface is eight or nine metres above low-water mark;[39] it then begins to fall with the same tranquillity, but not until it has deposited, upon the lands over which it has flowed, a thick layer of fertile mud which can be turned over easily with the lightest plough, and in which every seed will germinate, every plant spring up with extraordinary vigour and rapidity. [39] The river should rise to this height upon the Nilometer at Cairo if there is to be a "good Nile." In upper Egypt the banks of the river are much higher than in middle Egypt. In order to flow over those banks it must rise to a height of some eleven or twelve metres, and unless it rises more than thirteen metres it will not have a proper effect. [Illustration: FIG. 1.--During the Inundation of the Nile.] Thus nature has greatly facilitated the labour of the Egyptian agriculturist; the river takes upon itself the irrigation of the country for the whole width of its valley, and the preparation of the soil for the autumnal seed-time; it restores the virtue annually taken out of the ground by the crops. Each year it brings with it more fertility than can be exhausted in the twelve months, so that there is a constantly accumulating capital, on both banks of the river, of the richest vegetable earth. [Illustration: FIG. 2.--Hoeing; Beni-Hassan. (Champollion, pl. 381 _bis_.[40])]