Such, roughly summed up, are the fourfold surroundings of Philæ--the cataract, the river, the desert, the environing mo untains. The Holy Island--beautiful, lifeless, a thing of the far past, with all its wealth of sculpture, painting, history, poetry, tradition--sleeps, or seems to sleep, in the midst. It is one of the world’s famous landscapes, and it deserves its fame. Every sketcher sketches it; every traveler describes it. Yet it is just one of those places of which the objective and subjective features are so equally balanced that it bears putting neither into words nor colors. The sketcher must perforce leave out the atmosphere of association which informs his subject; and the writer’s description is at best no better than a catalogue raisonnée. CHAPTER XIII. PHILÆ TO KOROSKO. Sailing gently southward--the river opening wide before us, Philæ dwindling in the rear--we feel that we are now fairly over the border; and that if Egypt was strange and far from home, Nubia is stranger and farther still. The Nile here flows deep and broad. The rocky heights that hem it in so close on either side are still black on the one hand, golden on the other. The banks are narrower than ever. The space in some places is little wider than a towing-path. In others, there is barely room for a belt of date-palms and a slip of alluvial soil, every foot of which produces its precious growth of durra or barley. The steep verge below is green with lentils to the water’s edge. As the river recedes, it leaves each day a margin of fresh, wet soil, in which the careful husbandman hastens to scratch a new furrow and sow another line of seeds. He cannot afford to let so much as an inch of that kindly mud lie idle. Gliding along with half-filled sail, we observe how entirely the population seems to be regulated by the extent of arable soil. Where the inundation has room to spread, villages come thicker; more dusky figures are seen moving to and fro in the shade of the palms; more children race along the banks, shrieking for backshîsh. When the shelf of soil is narrowed, on the contrary, to a mere fringe of luminous green dividing the rock from the river, there is a startling absence of everything like life. Mile after mile drags its slow length along, uncheered by any sign of human habitation. When now and then a solitary native, armed with gun or spear, is seen striding along the edge of the desert, he only seems to make the general solitude more apparent.