INTRODUCTION. THE COUNTRY AND CLIMATE—METROPOLIS—HOUSES—POPULATION. It is generally observed that many of the most remarkable peculiarities in the manners, customs, and character of a nation are attributable to the physical peculiarities of the country. Such causes, in an especial manner, affect the moral and social slate of the modern Egyptians, and therefore here require some preliminary notice; but it will not as yet be necessary to explain their particular influences: these will be evinced in many subsequent parts of the present work. The Nile, in its course through the narrow and winding valley of Upper Egypt, which is confined on each side by mountainous and sandy deserts, as well as through the plain of Lower Egypt, is everywhere bordered, excepting in a very few places, by cultivated fields of its own formation. These cultivated tracts are not perfectly level, being somewhat lower towards the deserts than in the neighbourhood of the river. They are interspersed with palm groves and villages, and intersected by numerous canals. The copious summer rains which prevail in Abyssinia and the neighbouring countries begin to show their effects in Egypt, by the rising of the Nile, about the period of the summer solstice. By the autumnal equinox, the river attains its greatest height, which is always sufficient to fill the canals by which the fields are irrigated, and, generally, to inundate large portions of the cultivable land: it then gradually falls until the period when it again begins to rise. Being impregnated, particularly during its rise, with rich soil washed down from the mountainous countries whence it flows, a copious deposit is annually spread, either by the natural inundation or by artificial irrigation, over the fields which border it; while its bed, from the same cause, rises in an equal degree. The Egyptians depend entirely upon their river for the fertilization of the soil, rain being a very rare phenomenon in their country, excepting in the neighbourhood of the Mediterranean; and as the seasons are perfectly regular, the peasant may make his arrangements with the utmost precision respecting the labour he will have to perform. Sometimes his labour is light; but when it consists in raising water for irrigation it is excessively severe.