Produced by Bruce Albrecht, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: BY STILL WATERS.] [Illustration: SEBIL OF THE MOSQUE OF THE SULTAN KELAUN.] PEEPS AT MANY LANDS EGYPT BY R. TALBOT KELLY R.I., R.B.A., F.R.G.S. COMMANDER OF THE MEDJIDIEH WITH TWELVE FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY THE AUTHOR LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1916 * * * * * CONTENTS CHAPTER I. ITS ANTIQUITY II. THE LAND III. CAIRO--I IV. CAIRO--II V. THE NILE--I VI. THE NILE--II VII. THE NILE--III VIII. THE MONUMENTS IX. THE PEOPLE X. THE DESERT * * * * * LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS SEBIL OF THE MOSQUE OF THE SULTAN KELAUN _frontispiece_ AN IRRIGATED FIELD AN ARAB CAFÉ, CAIRO A MOSQUE INTERIOR A STREET IN CAIRO A WATERING-PLACE THE FIRST CATARACT FROM ELEPHANTINE ISLAND THE PYRAMIDS OF GHIZEH FROM THE DESERT THE COLOSSI OF THEBES--MOONRISE A NILE VILLAGE DESERT ARABS BY STILL WATERS _on the cover_ * * * * * [Illustration: SKETCH-MAP OF EGYPT.] * * * * * EGYPT CHAPTER 1 ITS ANTIQUITY Every boy or girl who has read the history of Joseph must often have wondered what kind of a country Egypt might be, and tried to picture to themselves the scenes so vividly suggested in the Bible story. It must have been a startling experience for the little shepherd boy, who, stolen from his home among the quiet hills of Canaan, so suddenly found himself an inmate of a palace, and, in his small way, a participator in the busy whirl of life of a royal city. No contrast could possibly have been greater than between his simple pastoral life spent in tending the flocks upon the hillsides and the magnificence of the city of Pharaoh, and how strange a romance it is to think of the little slave boy eventually becoming the virtual ruler of the most wealthy and most highly cultured country in the world! And then in course of time the very brothers who had so cruelly sold him into bondage were forced by famine to come to Joseph as suppliants for food, and, in their descendants, presently to become the meanest slaves in the land, persecuted and oppressed until their final deliverance by Moses.