The area multiplies the desolation.  There is life only by the Nile.  If a man were to leave the river, he might journey westward and find no human habitation, nor the smoke of a cooking fire, except the lonely tent of a Kabbabish Arab or the encampment of a trader’s caravan, till he reached the coast-line of America.  Or he might go east and find nothing but sand and sea and sun until Bombay rose above the horizon.  The thread of fresh water is itself solitary in regions where all living things lack company.

In the account of the River War the Nile is naturally supreme.  It is the great melody that recurs throughout the whole opera.  The general purposing military operations, the statesman who would decide upon grave policies, and the reader desirous of studying the course and results of either, must think of the Nile.  It is the life of the lands through which it flows.  It is the cause of the war:  the means by which we fight; the end at which we aim.  Imagination should paint the river through every page in the story.  It glitters between the palm-trees during the actions.  It is the explanation of nearly every military movement.  By its banks the armies camp at night.  Backed or flanked on its unfordable stream they offer or accept battle by day.  To its brink, morning and evening, long lines of camels, horses, mules, and slaughter cattle hurry eagerly.  Emir and Dervish, officer and soldier, friend and foe, kneel alike to this god of ancient Egypt and draw each day their daily water in goatskin or canteen.  Without the river none would have started.  Without it none might have continued.  Without it none could ever have returned.

All who journey on the Nile, whether in commerce or war, will pay their tribute of respect and gratitude; for the great river has befriended all races and every age.  Through all the centuries it has performed the annual miracle of its flood.  Every year when the rains fall and the mountain snows of Central Africa begin to melt, the head-streams become torrents and the great lakes are filled to the brim.  A vast expanse of low, swampy lands, crossed by secondary channels and flooded for many miles, regulates the flow, and by a sponge-like action prevents the excess of one year from causing the deficiency of the next.  Far away in Egypt, prince, priest, and peasant look southwards with anxious attention for the fluctuating yet certain rise.  Gradually the flood begins.  The Bahr-el-Ghazal from a channel of stagnant pools and marshes becomes a broad and navigable stream.  The Sobat and the Atbara from dry watercourses with occasional pools, in which the fish and crocodiles are crowded, turn to rushing rivers.  But all this is remote from Egypt.  After its confluence with the Atbara no drop of water reaches the Nile, and it flows for seven hundred miles through the sands or rushes in cataracts among the rocks of the Nubian desert.  Nevertheless, in spite of the tremendous diminution in volume caused by the dryness of the earth