triple division has been preferred to a twofold one, the Greeks
interposing the "Heptanomis" between the Thebais and the Delta, and the
Arabs the "Vostani" between the Said and the Bahari, or "country of the
sea."

It may be objected to this description, that the Egypt which it presents
to the reader is not the Egypt of the maps. Undoubtedly it is not. The
maps give the name of Egypt to a broad rectangular space which they mark
out in the north-eastern corner of Africa, bounded on two sides by the
Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and on the two others by two imaginary
lines which the map-makers kindly draw for us across the sands of the
desert. But "this Egypt," as has been well observed, "is a fiction of
the geographers, as untrue to fact as the island Atlantis of Greek
legend, or the Lyonnesse of mediæval romance, both sunk beneath the
ocean to explain their disappearance. The true Egypt of the old
monuments, of the Hebrews, of the Greeks and Romans, of the Arabs, and
of its own people in this day, is a mere fraction of this vast area of
the maps, nothing more than the valley and plain watered by the Nile,
for nearly seven hundred miles by the river's course from the
Mediterranean southwards."[1] The great wastes on either side of the
Nile valley are in no sense Egypt, neither the undulating sandy desert
to the west, nor the rocky and gravelly highland to the east, which
rises in terrace after terrace to a height, in some places, of six
thousand feet. Both are sparsely inhabited, and by tribes of a different
race from the Egyptian--tribes whose allegiance to the rulers of Egypt
is in the best times nominal, and who for the most part spurn the very
idea of submission to authority.

If, then, the true Egypt be the tract that we have described--the Nile
valley, with the Fayoum and the Delta--the lily stalk, the bud, and the