Let us ascend the Nile as far as Korosko, on the right bank of the river, and cross the huge chain of rocky hills which separates the cultivated zone from the Desert to which the village just spoken of gives name. These hills, all of equal elevation, assume the form of truncated cones. They are layers of granite superimposed horizontally, and with a depth of colour which makes them resemble at the first glance masses of basalt. They are absolutely bare, and separated from each other by abrupt sinuous gorges, whose bottom is covered deep in sand of golden lights, brought from the desert on the wings of the south-west. Long streams of the same brilliant sand descend the slopes opposed to the direction of the wind with graceful undulations, which subside imperceptibly in the blown sand that carpets the floor of these mysterious valleys. The crests of the hills can only be distinguished by their different colours; some are lightly shaded with gray, others with blue or green, and others again with rose or crimson. The reflets of the setting sun on these uniform and many-coloured summits have a marvellous splendour, lighting up the scene until it assumes a fairy aspect, "And all puts on a gentle hue, Hanging in the shadowy air, Like a picture rich and rare." At certain times it would rather remind the spectator of another of Coleridge's conceptions: "A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"[51] Yet the spectacle is generally one of a rare and peculiar loveliness. "If nature," says M. Trémaux,[52] "had invested with this kind of beauty our verdurous fields of the West, they would have been veritable Edens; but to produce, blend, and harmonize these inimitable hues, it requires, under the last beams of the sun, the emanations from the heated sands and those which the day has called into existence from the burning surfaces of the denuded rocks. It is by the side of her greatest horrors nature places her grandest beauties."