But to-day the foreigners are masters here, and have wakened the old Nile—­wakened to enslave it.  In less than twenty years they have disfigured its valley, which until then had preserved itself like a sanctuary.  They have silenced its cataracts, captured its precious water by dams, to pour it afar off on plains that are become like marshes and already sully with their mists the crystal clearness of the sky.  The ancient rigging no longer suffices to water the land under cultivation.  Machines worked by steam, which draw the water more quickly, commence to rise along the banks, side by side with new factories.  Soon there will scarcely be a river more dishonoured than this, by iron chimneys and thick, black smoke.  And it is happening apace, this exploitation of the Nile—­hastily, greedily, as in a hunt for spoils.  And thus all its beauty disappears, for its monotonous course, through regions endless alike, won us only by its calm and its old-world mystery.

Poor Nile of the prodigies!  One feels sometimes still its departing charm, stray corners of it remain intact.  There are days of transcendent clearness, incomparable evenings, when one may still forget the ugliness and the smoke.  But the classic expedition by dahabiya, the ascent of the river from Cairo to Nubia, will soon have ceased to be worth making.

Ordinarily this voyage is made in the winter, so that the traveller may follow the course of the sun as it makes its escape towards the southern hemisphere.  The water then is low and the valley parched.  Leaving the cosmopolitan town of modern Cairo, the iron bridges, and the pretentious hotels, with their flaunting inscriptions, it imparts a sense of sudden peacefulness to pass along the large and rapid waters of this river, between the curtains of palm-trees on the banks, borne by a dahabiya where one is master and, if one likes, may be alone.

At first, for a day or two, the great haunting triangles of the pyramids seem to follow you, those of Dashur and that of Sakkarah succeeding to those of Gizeh.  For a long time the horizon is disturbed by their gigantic silhouettes.  As we recede from them, and they disengage themselves better from neighbouring things, they seem, as happens in the case of mountains, to grow higher.  And when they have finally disappeared, we have still to ascend slowly and by stages some six hundred miles of river before we reach the first cataract.  Our way lies through monotonous desert regions where the hours and days are marked chiefly by the variations of the wonderful light.  Except for the phantasmagoria of the mornings and evenings, there is no outstanding feature on these dull-coloured banks, where may be seen, with never a change at all, the humble pastoral life of the fellahs.  The sun is burning, the starlit nights clear and cold.  A withering wind, which blows almost without ceasing from the north, makes you shiver as soon as the twilight falls.