and nature have been less gentle. Cataclysms may have engulfed more than
one Atlantis; and few climates are so fitted for the preservation of
man's buildings as is the rainless valley of the Nile.

[Footnote 2: See the _Dawn of Civilization_, page 1.]

Moreover, the Egyptians may not have been the earliest inhabitants even
of their own rich valley. We find hints that they were wanderers,
invaders, coming from the East, and that with the land they appropriated
also the ideas, the inventions, of an earlier negroid race. But whatever
they took they added to, they improved on. The idea of futurity, of
man's existence beyond the grave, became prominent among them; and in
the absence of clearer knowledge we may well take this idea as the
groundwork, the starting-point, of all man's later and more striking
progress.

Since the Egyptians believed in a future life they strove to preserve
the body for it, and built ever stronger and more gigantic tombs. They
strove to fit the mind for it, and cultivated virtues, not wholly animal
such as physical strength, nor wholly commercial such as cunning. They
even carved around the sepulchre of the departed a record of his doings,
lest they--and perhaps he too in that next life--forget. There were
elements of intellectual growth in all this, conditions to stimulate the
mind beyond the body.

And the Egyptians did develop. If one reads the tales, the romances,
that have survived from their remoter periods, he finds few emotions
higher than childish curiosity or mere animal rage and fear. Amid their
latest stories, on the contrary, we encounter touches of sentiment, of
pity and self-sacrifice, such as would even now be not unworthy of