Therefore, travel and exploration in this wonderful land, the remote but undoubted source of letters, morals, sciences and arts, are always interesting. Thebes, Memphis, Zoan-Tanis, Pitom, Tini, Philæ, Bubastis, Abydos, are but as fragments of mighty monuments, yet each discloses a story abounding in rich realities and more striking in its historic varieties than ever mortal man composed. But for the powerful people that made the Nile valley glow with empire, but for the tasteful people that made it beautiful with cities and monuments, but for the cultured people that wrote on stone and papyrus, were given to costly ceremonies, and who dreamed of the one God, the Israelites would have recrossed the Isthmus of Suez, or the Red Sea, without those germs of civilization, without those notions of Jehovah, which made them peculiar among their desert brethren, and saved them from absorption by the hardy tribes of Arabia and Syria. [Illustration: ROSETTA STONE.] In going from Europe across the Mediterranean to Egypt, you may think you can sail directly into one of the mouths of the Nile, and ascend that stream till the first cataract calls a halt. But neither of the great mouths of the Nile give good harbors. Like those of our own Mississippi, they are narrow and exposed by reason of the deposits they continually carry to the sea. The two main mouths of the Nile——it has had several outlets in the course of time——are over a hundred miles apart. The Western, or Rosetta, mouth was once the seat of a famed city from whose ruins were exhumed (1799) the historic “Rosetta Stone,” now in the British Museum. It was found on the site of a temple dedicated by Necho II. to Tum, “The Setting Sun;” and the inscription itself, written in three kinds of writing, Greek, hieroglyphic, and enchorial, or running hand, was a decree of the Egyptian Priests assembled in synod at Memphis in favor of Ptolomy Epiphanes, who had granted them some special favor. Its great value consisted in the fact that it afforded a safe key to the reading of the hieroglyphical writings found on all Egyptian monuments. [Illustration: M. DE LESSEPS.] The Eastern, or Damietta, mouth of the Nile gives a better harbor, but the boats are slow. Beyond this is Port Said, where you can enter the ship canal across the Isthmus of Suez and pass to the Red Sea. But you are not now in the Egypt you seek. There are no verdant meadows and forests of date palms and mulberry, which give to the interior of Lower Egypt——covered with numerous villages and intersected by thousands of canals——the picturesque character of a real garden of God. You only see a vast sandy plain, stretching on either side of the canal. It is a sea of sand with here and there little islands of reeds or thorny plants, white with salty deposits. In spite of the blue sky, the angel of death has spread his wings over this vast solitude where the least sign of life is an event. [Illustration: CLEOPATRA.]