When the Nile has reached a height of a little over fifteen old Arabic ells, it exceeds its lowest level by more than eight ells, and has reached the height requisite to enable it to irrigate the highest fields. This happy event is announced to the people, who await it with breathless anxiety, and the opening of the dykes may be proceeded with. A festival to celebrate this occasion has been held from the remotest times. At the present time customs prevail which can, it is alleged, be traced by direct descent to the times of the Pharaohs, and yet during the dominion of Christianity in Egypt, and later again under sovereigns governing a nation wholly converted to Islam, the old worship of the Nile, with all its splendour, its display, and its strange ceremonies, was extirpated with the utmost rigour. But some portion of every discarded religion becomes merged in the new one that has supplanted it as a fresh form of superstition, and thus we discover from a Christian document dating from the sixth century, that the rising of the Nile "in its time" was no longer attributed to Osiris, but to a certain Saint Orion, and, as the priest of antiquity taught that a tear of Isis led to the overflowing of the Nile, so we hear the Egyptians of the present day say that "a divine tear" has fallen into the stream and caused the flood. The trade of the Egyptians had given them very little knowledge of geography. Indeed the whole trade of the ancients was carried on by buying goods from their nearest neighbours on one side, and selling them to those on the other side of them. Long voyages were unknown; and, though the trading wealth of Egypt had mainly arisen from carrying the merchandise of India and Arabia Felix from the ports on the Red Sea to the ports on the Mediterranean, the Egyptians seem to have gained no knowledge of the countries from which these goods came. [Illustration: 256b.jpg SUK EL SALEH, CAIRO]