From the earliest creation there have been spots so
peculiarly favoured by nature, by geographical position, climate, and
fertility, that man has striven for their occupation, and they have
become scenes of contention for possession. Such countries have had a
powerful influence in the world's history, and such will be the great
pulses of civilization,--the sources from which in a future, however
distant, will flow the civilization of the world. Egypt is the land
whose peculiar capabilities have thus attracted the desires of conquest,
and with whom the world's earliest history is intimately connected.
Egypt has been an extraordinary instance of the actual formation of a
country by alluvial deposit; it has been CREATED by a single river. The
great Sahara, that frightful desert of interminable scorching sand,
stretching from the Red Sea to the Atlantic, is cleft by one solitary
thread of water. Ages before man could have existed in that inhospitable
land, that thread of water was at its silent work: through countless
years it flooded and fell, depositing a rich legacy of soil upon the
barren sand until the delta was created; and man, at so remote a period
that we have no clue to an approximate date, occupied the fertile soil
thus born of the river Nile, and that corner of savage Africa, rescued
from its barrenness, became Egypt, and took the first rank in the
earth's history.
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