Late in the history of the river-valley, but very early in the history of humanity, this favoured strip of country became the home of men, who doubtless cast their seed upon the slime left by the retreating waters, and reaped their crops long before the dawn of history. It is remarkable and characteristic of the conditions of the country that tradition ascribes to the earliest King of Egypt, Menes, the first King of the First Dynasty, the first attempts to regulate the flow of the river—in other words, the first scheme of irrigation proper. If it were possible to divert the river from its course, and effectually to bar its way before it reached the boundaries of Egypt, what an appalling catastrophe would follow—no mere disaster, but absolute annihilation! On the coast lands of the Mediterranean a sparse population might still eke out a miserable existence by storing the scanty rainfall, but nowhere else. The very oases of the desert would be dried up, and in a short time the shifting sands of the Sahara would have overlaid the deposits in the river-valley, and buried out of sight even the ruins of the past. The waters of the Nile are, and ever have been, the sole giver of all life in Egypt. Whoever finds himself in Cairo should lose no time in taking his stand upon the bridge, and in reflecting upon the history of the water that goes sliding and eddying beneath him, on the way to perform its last duties among the cotton-fields of the delta. Some of it has been travelling for three months from its sources beyond the Victoria Nyanza, itself over 1,100 metres[1] above sea-level. From the Victoria Nyanza it has passed down the Somerset Nile into the Albert Nyanza, thence a five days’ journey to Lado, past Duffile and the Fola Rapids. From Lado to Bor the fall is still rapid, but henceforward as far as Khartoum, some 1,000 miles, the stream is on a very feeble slope. Between Bor and the junction of the Ghazal River on the left bank is the region of the sudd, floating masses of compressed vegetation, which, if neglected entirely, block the course of the river. Here, too, are the wide and desolate marshes, inhabited by myriads of mosquitoes and that strange, melancholy bird, the whale-headed stork (_Balæniceps rex_).