Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Insinger.

This stage of the journey was beset with difficulties, for the Sirbonian Lake did not always present the same aspect, and its margins were constantly shifting.  When the canals which connected it with the open sea happened to become obstructed, the sheet of water subsided from evaporation, leaving in many places merely an expanse of shifting mud, often concealed under the sand which the wind brought up from the desert.  Travellers ran imminent risk of sinking in this quagmire, and the Greek historians tell of large armies being almost entirely swallowed up in it.  About halfway along the length of the lake rose the solitary hill of Mount Casios; beyond this the sea-coast widened till it became a vast slightly undulating plain, covered with scanty herbage, and dotted over with wells containing an abundant supply of water, which, however, was brackish and disagreeable to drink.

[Illustration:  178.jpg Map]

Beyond these lay a grove of palms, a brick prison, and a cluster of miserable houses, bounded by a broad wady, usually dry.  The bed of the torrent often served as the boundary between Africa and Asia, and the town was for many years merely a convict prison, where ordinary criminals, condemned to mutilation and exile, were confined; indeed, the Greeks assure us that it owed its name of Rhinocolura to the number of noseless convicts who were to be seen there.*

* The ruins of the ancient town, which were of considerable extent, are half buried under the sand, out of which an Egyptian naos of the Ptolemaic period has been dug, and placed near the well which supplies the fort, where it serves as a drinking trough for the horses.  Brugsch believed he could identify its site with that of the Syrian town Hurnikheri, which he erroneously reads Harinkola; the ancient form of the name is unknown, the Greek form varies between Rhinocorura and Rhinocolura.  The story of the mutilated convicts is to be found in Diodorus Siculus, as well as in Strabo; it rests on a historical fact.  Under the XVIIIth dynasty Zalu was used as a place of confinement for dishonest officials.  For this purpose it was probably replaced by Rhinocolura, when the Egyptian frontier was removed from the neighbourhood of Selle to that of El-Arish.

At this point the coast turns in a north-easterly direction, and is flanked with high sand-hills, behind which the caravans pursue their way, obtaining merely occasional glimpses of the sea.  Here and there, under the shelter of a tower or a half-ruined fortress, the traveller would have found wells of indifferent water, till on reaching the confines of Syria he arrived at the fortified village of Raphia, standing like a sentinel to guard the approach to Egypt.  Beyond Raphia vegetation becomes more abundant, groups of sycamores and mimosas and clusters of date-palms appear on the horizon, villages surrounded with fields and orchards are seen on all sides, while the bed of a river, blocked with gravel and fallen rocks, winds its way between the last fringes of the desert and the fruitful Shephelah;* on the further bank of the river lay the suburbs of Gaza, and, but a few hundred yards beyond, Gaza itself came into view among the trees standing on its wall-crowned hill.**