influence of Spain, except for the oversea stimuli brought to it by the Atlantic.  England’s long southern face close to the French coast had for centuries the effect of interweaving its history with that of its southern neighbor.  The conspicuous fact in the foreign history of Japan has been its intimate connection with Korea above all the other states.[259] Egypt, which projects as an alluvial peninsula into an ocean of desert from southwestern Asia, has seen its history, from the time of the Shepherd Kings to that of Napoleon, repeatedly linked with Palestine and Syria.  Every Asiatic or European conquest of these two countries has eventually been extended to the valley of the Nile; and Egypt’s one great period of expansion saw this eastern coast of the Mediterranean as far as the Euphrates united to the dominion of the Pharaohs.  Here is a one-sided geographical location in an exaggerated form, emphasized by the physical and political barrenness of the adjacent regions of Africa and the strategic importance of the isthmian district between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean.

[Sidenote:  Scattered location due to geographic conditions.]

The forms of vicinal location thus far considered presuppose a compact or continuous distribution, such as characterizes the more fertile and populous areas of the earth.  Desert regions, whether due to Arctic cold or extreme aridity, distribute their sparse population in small groups at a few favored points, and thus from physical causes give rise to the anthropo-geographical phenomenon of scattered location.  Districts of intense cold, which sustain life only in contact with marine supplies of food, necessitate an intermittent distribution along the seaboard, with long, unoccupied stretches between.  This is the location we are familiar with among the Eskimo of Greenland and Alaska, among the Norse and Lapps in the rugged Norwegian province of Finmarken, where over two-thirds of the population live by fishing.  In the interior districts of this province about Karasjok and Kantokeino, the reindeer Lapps show a corresponding scattered grouping here and there on the inhospitable slopes of the mountains.[260] In that one-half of Switzerland lying above the altitude where agriculture is possible, population is sprinkled at wide intervals over the sterile surface of the highlands.

A somewhat similar scattered location is found in arid deserts, where population is restricted to the oases dropped here and there at wide intervals amid the waste of sand.  But unlike those fragments of human life on the frozen outskirts of the habitable world, the oasis states usually constitute links in a chain of connection across the desert between the fertile lands on either side, and therefore form part of a series, in which the members maintain firm and necessary economic relations.  Every caravan route across the Sahara is dotted by a series of larger or smaller tribal settlements.  Tripoli, Sokna, Murzuk, Bilma and Bornu form one such chain; Algiers, El Golea, Twat, the salt mines of Taudeni, Arawan and Timbuctoo, another.  Bagdad, Hayil, Boreyda and Mecca trace the road of pilgrim and merchant starting from the Moslem land of the Euphrates to the shrine of Mohammed.[261]