Another striking and peculiar feature of Egyptian scenery was the beautiful river--the one only river--on which the prosperity, the very existence, of the country depended. It, too, had a perpetual story to tell, a parable to unfold, as it flowed and swelled and contracted in its beneficent yearly course. They saw that all growth and life depended on its action; where its waters reached, there followed fruitfulness and beauty, and a thousand teeming forms of animal, vegetable, and insect life; where its furthest wave stayed, there the reign of nothingness and death began again. The Nile, therefore, became to the ancient Egyptians the token and emblem of a life-giving principle in nature, of that perpetual renewal, that passing from one form of existence into another, which has ever had so much hopeful significance for all thinking minds. Its blue colour when it reflected the sky was the most sacred of their emblems, and was devoted to funeral decorations and to the adornments of the dead, because it spoke to them of the victory of life over death, of the permanence of the life-principle amid the evanescent and vanishing forms under which it appeared. Of these two distinctive features of nature in Egypt, the unexplored western desert and the unending river, we must, then, think as exercising a modifying or intensifying effect on the impressions produced on the minds of ancient Egyptians by those aspects of nature which they had in common with other Eastern peoples. Let us think what these are. First and most conspicuous we must put the sun, in all his changing aspects, rising in gentle radiance over the eastern hills, majestically climbing the cloudless sky, sending down fierce perpendicular rays through all the hot noon, withdrawing his overwhelming heat towards evening as he sloped to his rest, and painting the western sky with colour and glory, on which the eyes of men could rest without being dazzled, vanishing from sight at last behind the white rocks in the west. And then the moon--white, cold, changeable, ruling the night and measuring time. Besides these, the planets and countless hosts of stars; the green earth constantly pouring forth food for man from its bosom; the glowing blue sky at noon and the purple midnight heaven; the moving wind; the darkness that seemed to eat up and swallow the day. [Sidenote: Sun-gods.] [Sidenote: Amun.]