Flying before the wind with both sails set, we see the rapid panorama unfold itself day after day, mile after mile, hour after hour. Villages, palm groves, rock-cut sepulchers, flit past and are left behind. To-day we enter the region of the dôm palm. To-morrow we pass the map-drawn limit of the crocodile. The cliffs advance, recede, open away into desolate-looking valleys, and show faint traces of paths leading to excavated tombs on distant heights. The headland that looked shadowy in the distance a couple of hours ago is reached and passed. The cargo-boat on which we have been gaining all the morning is outstripped and dwindling in the rear. Now we pass a bold bluff sheltering a sheik’s tomb and a solitary dôm palm--now an ancient quarry from which the stone has been cut out in smooth masses, leaving great halls, and corridors, and stages in the mountain side. At Gow,[31] the scene of an insurrection headed by a crazy dervish some ten years ago, we see, in place of a large and populous village, only a tract of fertile corn ground, a few ruined huts, and a group of decapitated palms. We are now skirting Gebel Sheik el Hereedee; here bordered by a rich margin of cultivated flat; yonder leaving space for scarce a strip of roadway between the precipice and the river. Then comes Raáineh, a large village of square mud towers, lofty and battlemented, with string-courses of pots for the pigeons--and later on, Girgeh, once the capital town of Middle Egypt, where we put in for half an hour to post and inquire for letters. Here the Nile is fast eating away the bank and carrying the town by storm. A ruined mosque with pointed arches, roofless cloisters, and a leaning column that must surely have come to the ground by this time, stands just above the landing-place. A hundred years ago it lay a quarter of a mile from the river; ten years ago it was yet perfect; after a few more inundations it will be swept away. Till that time comes, however, it helps to make Girgeh one of the most picturesque towns in Egypt. At Farshût we see the sugar-works in active operation--smoke pouring from the tall chimneys; steam issuing from the traps in the basement; cargo-boats unlading fresh sugar-cane against the bank; heavily burdened Arabs transporting it to the factory; bullock trucks laden with cane-leaf for firing. A little higher up, at Sahîl Bajûra on the opposite side of the river, we find the bank strewn for full a quarter of a mile with sugar-cane _en masse_. Hundreds of camels are either arriving laden with it, or going back for more--dozens of cargo-boats are drawn up to receive it--swarms of brown fellâheen are stacking it on board for unshipment again at Farshût. The camels snort and growl; the men shout; the overseers, in blue-fringed robes and white turbans, stalk to and fro, and keep the work going. The mountains here recede so far as to be almost out of sight, and a plain rich in sugar-cane and date-palms widens out between them and the river.