Through the desert flows the river—­a thread of blue silk drawn across an enormous brown drugget; and even this thread is brown for half the year.  Where the water laps the sand and soaks into the banks there grows an avenue of vegetation which seems very beautiful and luxuriant by contrast with what lies beyond.  The Nile, through all the three thousand miles of its course vital to everything that lives beside it, is never so precious as here.  The traveller clings to the strong river as to an old friend, staunch in the hour of need.  All the world blazes, but here is shade.  The deserts are hot, but the Nile is cool.  The land is parched, but here is abundant water.  The picture painted in burnt sienna is relieved by a grateful flash of green.

Yet he who had not seen the desert or felt the sun heavily on his shoulders would hardly admire the fertility of the riparian scrub.  Unnourishing reeds and grasses grow rank and coarse from the water’s edge.  The dark, rotten soil between the tussocks is cracked and granulated by the drying up of the annual flood.  The character of the vegetation is inhospitable.  Thorn-bushes, bristling like hedgehogs and thriving arrogantly, everywhere predominate and with their prickly tangles obstruct or forbid the path.  Only the palms by the brink are kindly, and men journeying along the Nile must look often towards their bushy tops, where among the spreading foliage the red and yellow glint of date clusters proclaims the ripening of a generous crop, and protests that Nature is not always mischievous and cruel.

The banks of the Nile, except by contrast with the desert, display an abundance of barrenness.  Their characteristic is monotony.  Their attraction is their sadness.  Yet there is one hour when all is changed.  Just before the sun sets towards the western cliffs a delicious flush brightens and enlivens the landscape.  It is as though some Titanic artist in an hour of inspiration were retouching the picture, painting in dark purple shadows among the rocks, strengthening the lights on the sands, gilding and beautifying everything, and making the whole scene live.  The river, whose windings make it look like a lake, turns from muddy brown to silver-grey.  The sky from a dull blue deepens into violet in the west.  Everything under that magic touch becomes vivid and alive.  And then the sun sinks altogether behind the rocks, the colors fade out of the sky, the flush off the sands, and gradually everything darkens and grows grey—­like a man’s cheek when he is bleeding to death.  We are left sad and sorrowful in the dark, until the stars light up and remind us that there is always something beyond.

In a land whose beauty is the beauty of a moment, whose face is desolate, and whose character is strangely stern, the curse of war was hardly needed to produce a melancholy effect.  Why should there be caustic plants where everything is hot and burning?  In deserts where thirst is enthroned, and where the rocks and sand appeal to a pitiless sky for moisture, it was a savage trick to add the mockery of mirage.