In Egypt a man's wealth and standing is usually reckoned on the basis of the number of wives he possesses: when our crowd arrived many of the fruit-sellers had only one—or one and an old one—yet inside a week or two the same johnnies were bossing up a tidy little harem of prime goods. So indirectly I guess our pay helped keep polygamy going—and increased the population. Egypt exists by favour of the Nile. Outside the irrigation belt lies desert and nothing but desert—the Hinterland or Never-Never of Northern Africa. Except for an oasis here and there the eye searches in vain for a trace of greenery. A huge rolling plain of yellow sand mixed with limestone, and carpeted in places with round, seemingly water-worn pebbles, amongst which one finds agates in abundance; here and there broken and serrated rocks outcropping boldly in fantastic shapes from great drifts of storm-driven sand; a brooding loneliness—there you have it. And yet in the Valley of the Nile what a contrast! The very atmosphere is redolent of fertility. Here is, indeed, a "land flowing with milk and honey"; a land which, give it the water, will bloom like a garden and smell like a huge pot-pourri. I have seen some of the best country in four continents, yet I never ran across richer soil or more exuberant growth than that of the Nile Valley. When one bears in mind that the methods of irrigation and system of tillage are those of the dim and distant past; that a metal plough is an object of mixed curiosity and distrust; that steam is not; that the fertiliser used (when it _is_ used) once sheltered, in the form of towns and villages whose history was closed ere the Bible was written, the heads of their own forefathers—then one is, indeed, forced to marvel at a land which yields such husbandmen seventy- and eighty-ton crops of sugarcane to the acre, and gives nine and ten cuttings of berseine—in the year, while carrying at the same time the mixed flocks and herds of the lucky proprietor. Little wonder, then, that the _fellahin_ pray to the Nile as the Romans used to pray to Father Tiber—although hardly with the same objects.