As soon as we pass beyond the narrow borders of the Nile valley we encounter the Desert. Egypt _is_, in fact, the Nile; the Nile makes, recreates, preserves, fecundates Egypt, which, without this grand and ever-famous river, would immediately cease to be. "Everything in Egypt," says Miss Martineau,[50] with equal truth and eloquence, "life itself, and all that it includes, depends on the state of the unintermitting conflict between the Nile and the Desert. The world has seen many straggles; but no other so pertinacious, so perdurable, and so sublime as the conflict of these two great powers. The Nile, ever young, because perpetually renewing its youth, appears to the inexperienced eye to have no chance, with its stripling force, against the great old Goliath, the Desert, whose might has never relaxed from the earliest days till now; but the giant has not conquered it. Now and then he has prevailed for a season, and the tremblers whose destiny hung on the event have cried out that all was over; but he has once more been driven back, and Nilus has risen up again to do what we see him doing in the sculptures--bind up his water-plants about the throne of Egypt." The traveller, ascending the famous river which has so long been mixed up with an apparently insoluble geographical problem, sees the Desert everywhere present; its yellow boundary-line is vividly traced against the rich emerald-green of the fertile valley, and, as he advances, that line seems to draw nearer and nearer, until the cultivated soil appears reduced to a narrow strip on the river-bank. It has encroached upon many once prosperous and busy sites, and buried deeply the memorials of the old Egyptian civilization. "Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away." Everywhere outside the valley of the Nile, I repeat, lies the Desert. West of the Arabian chain of heights stretch the vast sandy plains frequented by the Arab tribes of the Beni-Wassel and the Arabdé. Beyond the eastern chain spread the Libyan Deserts, which, in the remote distance, merge into the Great Sahara, and those of the Thebaïd, where the early Christian anchorites found a dismal asylum. Lower, to the south of Egypt, extend the Deserts of Lower Nubia.