If the traveller wishes to see something of the agriculture of the Delta, he would get some idea of the astonishing fertility of the country by merely taking the train to Damanhour, the center of the cotton-growing district. The journey does not take more than a couple of hours. The passenger travelling by steamer from Alexandria to Port Said, though he skirts the coast, can see no signs of the agricultural wealth of Egypt, and for him the whole of Egypt might be an arid desert instead of one of the most fertile districts in the whole world. The area of cultivated lands, which, however, extends yearly seawards, is separated from the coast by a belt composed of strips of sandy desert, marshy plain, low sandhills, and salt lagunes, which varies in breadth from fifteen to thirty miles. A line drawn from Alexandria to Damietta, through the southern shore of Lake Boorlos, marks approximately the limit of cultivated land in this part of the Delta. The most unobservant traveller in Egypt cannot help perceiving that its sole industry is agriculture, and that the bulk of its inhabitants are tillers of the soil. Egypt seems, indeed, intended by nature to be the granary and market-garden of North Africa, and the prosperity of the country depends on its being allowed to retain its place as a purely agricultural country. The ill-advised, but fortunately futile, attempts which have been made by recent rulers to develop manufactures at the expense of agriculture, are the outcome of a short-sighted policy or perverted ambition. Experience has proved that every acre diverted from its ancient and rational use as a bearer of crops is a loss to the national wealth. That "Egypt is the gift of the Nile" has been insisted upon with "damnable iteration" by every writer on Egypt, from Herodotus downwards. According to the popular etymology,[7] the very name of the Nile ([Greek: Neilos], from [Greek: nea ilys], new mud) testifies to its peculiar fertilizing properties. The Nile is all in all to the Egyptian, and can we wonder that Egyptian mythologists recognized in it the Creative Principle waging eternal warfare with Typhon, the Destructive Principle, represented by the encroaching desert? As Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole has well observed, "without the Nile there would be no Egypt; the great African Sahara would spread uninterruptedly to the Red Sea. Egypt is, in short, a long oasis worn in the rocky desert by the ever-flowing stream, and made green and fertile by its waters."