The time of the story is laid in the middle ages of Grecian history, after the conclusion of the wars between Greece and Persia, and while Egypt was still governed by the satraps of the great king; and the first scene at once plunges the reader, in accordance with the Horatian precept, in medias res.  A band of marauders, prowling on the coast of Egypt, are surprised by the sight of a ship moored to the shore without any one on board, while the beach around is strewed with the fragments of a costly banquet, and with a number of dead bodies of men, slain apparently in mutual conflict; the only survivors being a damsel of surpassing beauty, arrayed as a priestess of Diana, who is wailing over the inanimate form of a wounded youth.  Before they have time however, either to unravel the mystery, or to avail themselves of the booty, thus unexpectedly spread before them, they are in turn put to flight by a more numerous party of robbers, or rather buccaneers, (bucoli or herdsmen,) who carry off the forlorn couple to their retreat, in the inner-most recesses of a vast lake or morass, near the Heracleotic mouth of the Nile.[55] The description of this robber-colony appears to have been drawn from an existing or well-remembered state of things, and bears considerable resemblance, except in the presence of women and children, to a setsha, or stronghold, of the Zaporog Cossacks in the islets of the Dniepr.

[Footnote 55:  This is usually called the Canopia mouth; but Herodotus (who says that it was dug by artificial means) calls it the Bucolic, perhaps from the haunts above described in its neighbourhood.]

“This whole region is called by the Egyptians the Bucolia, or ‘pasturages,’ and is a tract of low land, which has been converted by the inundations of the Nile into a lake, of great depth in the middle, and gradually shoaling towards the margins into a marsh.  Among this labyrinth of lakes and morasses, all the robber-community of Egypt hold their commonwealth; some building huts wherever there is enough of dry land for the purpose, and others living wholly on board their boats, which serve them for a home, as well as to transport them from place to place.  In these narrow craft their children are born and brought up, tied by a cord round their foot, in their infancy, to keep them from falling overboard, and tasting for their first food, after being weaned, the fish of the lake dried in the sun.  Thus, many of these buccaneers are natives of the lake itself, which they regard as their country and their fortress; and they also receive among them many recruits of the same sort as themselves.  The waters serve them for a defence, and they are further fortified by the vast quantity of reeds overgrowing the borders of the lake, through which they have contrived certain narrow winding paths known only to themselves, to guard them against sudden incursions from without.”