Somali or Gala, and the inhabitants of southern Arabia, grew thin and wedge-shaped beards. Their lips were full, their noses straight and finely shaped. Their degenerate descendants continue to exist with but little altered facial type in the Danākil, Somali, and Gala of the present day; but in the northern half of the Nile valley they became in time the main stock of the Egyptian population. They also, it would seem, profoundly modified Negro Africa; for while on the one hand they started out by a series of race movements and conquests from the direction of Abyssinia to invade and mould Egypt, on the other (though more faint-heartedly) they advanced in a southwesterly direction to influence Negro Africa. They have formed aristocracies in the countries round the head-waters of the White Nile. Their influence on the Negro races has been widespread, permeating, even though faintly, in a handsome physical type and remarkable form of language, to Zululand on the south and perhaps westward across the continent to the Congo, the Cross River, and the Atlantic coast. This Hamitic race (as it is called for want of a better word), which made its first home--and retains as its last--the highlands of Abyssinia and the plateaux and arid coastlands of Afar, Somaliland, and the Gala countries, has been the mainstay of Ancient Egypt, and also, together with its not distantly related Libyan brethren, the main human agent in saving the Negro from slipping back into the life of the anthropoid ape. [Illustration: THE NILE AND THE PYRAMIDS.]