Nothing surely can be so restful as life on a Nile boat, where one lies at his ease upon the deck with some book like _Pyramids in Progress_ in his hand, and watches the procession along the banks of men, women, and children, donkeys, camels, cattle, and occasionally horses, which goes on from Cairo to Assouan, and, so far as I know, to Khartoum, and looking into the far distances of the desert, across the strip of green on either side of the river, and listening to the friendly sound of the water wheels which distribute the Nile through the parched ground, and then standing to see the blood-red sunset fade into orange and green and violet, while the river turns into that delicate and indescribable colour which, for want of some other word, is known as water-of-Nile. The river itself takes hold of the imagination, whose origin has been a historical mystery, on whose rise and fall the welfare of a country depends, which carries the fertility of Egypt in its bosom, and on which nations depend for their very life. No wonder it runs as a blue streak through the frescoes in the tombs, and is never away from the thoughts of the painters, for the Nile runs also through the life of the people. It is the great highway up which the native boats sail their skilful course driven by the north wind, down which they drop laden with produce or pottery. It gives them the soil they till, which is rich enough to bear twelve harvests a year, if crops could be ripened in a month. Upon its banks the people sit as at their club; they bring down their cattle to water at it, they wash in the Nile, both themselves and their clothes, they swim and dive in the Nile as if they had been bom in it, and they drink its thick, brown, sweet water with such relish that a native Egyptian resents the idea of a filter because it takes away from him the very joy of taste, and laughs at the idea of danger from his loved Nile, which may give typhoid fever to Western tourists, but will never do any injury to its own children.