But to return to the Nile, the source of existence of this great population. Next to the Mississippi, with the Missouri, it is the longest river of the world. The geographers put its length at from thirty-seven hundred to four thousand miles. It is a hundred miles or so longer than the Amazon, and during the last seventeen hundred miles of its course not a single branch comes in to add to its volume. For most of the way it flows through a desert of rock and sand as dry as the Sahara. In the summer many of the winds that sweep over Cairo are like the blast from a furnace, and in Upper Egypt a dead dog thrown into the fields will turn to dust without an offensive odour. The dry air sucks the moisture out of the carcass so that there is no corruption. Nearly all of the cultivated lands lie along the Nile banks and depend for their supply of water on the rise of the river, caused by the rains in the region around its sources. When the Nile is in flood the waters are coloured dark brown by the silt brought down from the high lands of Abyssinia. When it is low, as in June, they are green, because of the growth of water plants in the upper parts of the river. At flood time the water is higher than the land and the fields are protected by banks or dikes along the river. If these banks break, the fields are flooded and the crops destroyed. We are accustomed to look upon Egypt as a very hot country. This is not so. The greater part of it lies just outside the tropics, so that it has a warm climate and a sub-tropical plant life. The hottest month is June and the coldest is January. Ice sometimes forms on shallow pools in the delta, but there is no snow, although hail storms occur occasionally, with very large stones. There is no rain except near the coast and a little near Cairo. Fogs are common in January and February and it is frequently damp in the cultivated tracts. For centuries Egypt has been in the hands of other nations. The Mohammedan Arabs and the Ottoman Turks have been bleeding her since their conquest. Greece once fed off her. Rome ate up her substance in the days of the Cæsars and she has had to stake the wildest extravagancies of the khedives of the past. It must be remembered that Egypt is almost altogether agricultural, and that all of the money spent in and by it must come from what the people can raise on the land. The khedives and officials have piped, and Egypt’s farmers have had to pay. It was not long before my second visit to Egypt that the wastefulness and misrule of her officials had practically put her in the hands of a receiver. She had gone into debt for half a billion dollars to European creditors—English, French, German, and Spanish—and England and France had arranged between them to pull her out. Later France withdrew from the agreement and Great Britain undertook the job alone.