The Hebrew wonder-workers were confronted by the magicians of Egypt. Amon-Ra could not yield without a struggle to the God of the ‘impure’ stranger. The miracles performed by the representatives of the Israelitish people were not beyond the powers of his servants, and the magical powers of the Egyptian priests had been famous from the beginning of time. The Egyptian had an intense belief in magic—a belief which still survives in the modern Egypt of to-day. Books had been compiled which reduced this magic to a science, and enabled those who would learn its formulæ and methods to reverse the order of nature and work whatsoever wonder they desired.[169] To transform a rod into a serpent, or a serpent into a rod, was a comparatively easy feat, and one which the jugglers of Cairo can still perform. Equally easy was it to turn the water of the river into blood, or even to multiply the frogs on the wet land. It was only when the plague of lice touched themselves that the power of the magicians failed, and that they confessed themselves overcome by a stronger deity than those they owned. Their magic could not remove the plague which had fallen upon them; their own garments were defiled in spite of their charms and amulets, and they had become more unclean than the ‘unclean’ foreigner himself. The account of the ten plagues of Egypt betrays an intimate acquaintance with the characteristics and peculiarities of the valley of the Nile. They are all plagues which still recur there; some of them indeed may be said never to have left the country. Still, each year, the water of the river becomes like blood at the time of the inundation. When the Nile first begins to rise, towards the end of June, the red marl brought from the mountains of Abyssinia stains it to a dark colour, which glistens like blood in the light of the setting sun.[170] Each year, too, the inundation brings with it myriads of frogs, which swarm along the banks of the river and canals, and fill the night air with continuous croakings. The lice, again, are an ever-present plague among the poorer natives, while every spring the flies still swarm in the houses and open air, and irritate the visitor to Egypt almost beyond endurance. Flies and lice, frogs and blood-red water, are all as much a part of modern Egypt as they were of the Egypt of the Mosaic age. Natives and strangers alike suffered from them, and that the plague of flies did not reach to Goshen must have seemed to the Egyptians a miracle of miracles.