Although Sicily, then, has many wonderful sights in and around it, I will meantime withdraw your mind wholly from your own province, and, passing by all questions relating to it, will direct your thoughts to a far different scene. In your society I will resume the inquiry postponed in my last book, why the Nile overflows in the summer months. Now, let me remark that the philosophers have asserted the similarity of the Danube to the Nile, because its source is unknown and it is larger in summer than in winter. Both statements are clearly false. We know for a fact that the Danube rises in Germany. Again, though the rise of the Danube begins in summer, it is at a period when the Nile still remains within its ordinary limits: the heat is then only beginning, and the stronger sun toward the latter part of spring is softening the snows, but it has to melt them before the Nile begins to rise. During the remainder of the summer the Danube actually falls until it reaches its winter size, from which in due course it begins its rise again.[62] [62] The meaning of the last clause is taken by some to be: and even falls below it--a somewhat pointless remark. II But the increase of the Nile begins in the middle of the hot season, 1 before the rise of the dog-star, and continues till after the equinox. Nature has raised up this noble river before the eyes of the world, and has so ordered its inundation of the land of Egypt that it should occur at the very time at which the ground is most parched with heat. The earth thus drinks the more deeply, and imbibes sufficient to counteract the drought of the whole year. In the part of Egypt that stretches round Ethiopia, you must bear in mind, there is either no rain at all or it occurs only at long intervals, and is insufficient to give much relief to a land which ordinarily knows nothing of water from the clouds. It is in the Nile, as you are aware, that Egypt reposes all 2 its hopes. According to the abundance or scantiness of its overflow is the leanness or the fatness of its season. _None of its farmers regards the sky_, are the words of your own poem. And why should I not crack a joke with my dear poet friend, and retort with a verse from his favourite Ovid?[63] who says: Nor do the herbs make supplication to the rain-god Jupiter. [63] The quotation is really from Tibullus.