out near Canopus (Aboukir), now flows only down the bed of what was a secondary stream, the Taly, and issues at the old Bolbitinic estuary, the modern Rosetta mouth. It is curious to note how utterly the traces of its ancient channel have been effaced in about a thousand years. It used to pass by the Greek city of Naukratis, and there perhaps its course can still be traced in the hollow between the site and a small mound, which is evidently the remains of a heaped-up bank such as would have aligned the river. The Thermuthiac and Athribitic Niles are now represented respectively by the canalised Bahr Nashart and the Bahr Tirah, but the modern streams do not run continuously in the old beds. The actual Athribitic channel I discovered in midmarsh, sweeping past a chain of mounds; it has long been dry, but its dykes still remain, defining a bed about 350 feet wide.

So much for the true marsh-land. North of it lies the lagoon district, fenced from the sea by a broad belt of dunes. It shows in most respects a sharp contrast to the fens, being a region comparatively rich and populous, and of very old settlement; but it is neither less remote, nor better known to the casual tourist in Egypt. Nor is it one whit less interesting, for nowhere in the Nile land is to be seen a region more primitive, or a more recent contact of aboriginal Eastern folk and Western in-comers. Here the two elements still meet almost as strangers, each unalloyed by the other. Indeed, with the seaward part of the district it may still be said that the European has nothing to do. If once in many moons a British inspector of coastguard or canal outfalls pay a flying visit, he will be stared at a moment and forgotten, like some strange bird that has lighted suddenly on the lagoons.

To reach the lakes you must descend one of the greater canals of the Central Delta before the summer dryness in a boat of the lightest draught, and, leaving the last of the locks far behind, pass beyond all habitations of Nile husbandmen into an amphibious Limbo, in doubt between land and water where no life of man abides continually. Soon the canal dykes cease on either hand, and the banks fall to a few inches in height. Let your boat slip on a mile or two more. The flood brims bank high, its wavelets slop on to the land, and, lo! you find there is no longer land either to right or left, behind or before. Undefined by any line of coast, Egypt has slid at the last under her own waters and become invisible at less than a mile away, and the voyager finds himself adrift on a sea, seeming limitless, so low are its shores,

and bottomless, so turbid are its harassed waves.

Yet, in fact, if a tall man let himself down into any part of the great area of this lake the surface will scarcely rise to his armpit.

Holding on its course, the boat passes at once out of that dead world of the fen into one of singular life, a life not of land any longer, but water, whereof forewarning was given some miles up the canal at the last settlement of man. There fishing nets hang to wind and sun, and a little fleet of keelless craft collects any afternoon while a Copt sells its draught of fish at auction. The catch of each crew is offered as a whole. A salesman squatting over the mat stirs the palpitating heap to work the larger fish to the top; a fat one he picks out and puts by in a palm-leaf pannier for the auctioneer, a second for the writer, a third for himself. The rest is bid for at prices ranging from ten to forty piastres, sold, packed on asses, and despatched to feed the marshmen for many miles around. You will not sail a mile on the lake unamazed at its scaly wealth. Silvery bodies leap by tens and twenties from the ochrous surface, and the water boils with the passing of shoals. Boats at anchor, boats adrift with trailing nets, boats under full sail, multiply as one goes north and east, till all the loneliness of the Limbo is forgotten. All round the horizon spring groves of perpendicular poles crossed by poles oblique, the masts and lateen yards of invisible hulls, moored by invisible islets whose sandy levels are all but awash. I know not how many craft ply on Lake Burullos, but the tale must run into hundreds and that of the fisher folk to thousands-the latter of a blond type dignified with some of that energy and reserve which are seldom altogether wanting to men whose business is on great waters. I had neither opportunity nor occasion to study them closely, but received a clear impression of their racial antiquity. The general type of features seems to be that sharply marked and over refined sort which one associates with an old inbred race, and the women often reminded me strongly of the characteristic type on the Egyptian monuments. An anthropometrist might find not a little to interest him in this remote and secluded corner of the Nile Valley.

The new land does not begin to rise on the north-eastern horizon till a dozen barren islets have slipped astern. First emerge the higher dunes, uplifted in a shimmering mirage, rose and yellow like low cumulus clouds touched by sunset. These run one into another till they become a continuous range, spotted with black tufts, which are the plumes of half-buried palms. A cluster of huts to left with certain upstanding blocks is the

village of Borg, with its dismantled fort and coastguard station, situated on all that remains of the Sebennytic estuary of the Nile. A rank odour of curing comes down the wind, for there are dried the putrescent fish on which half the poor of Lower Egypt live. To right and ahead, as you wear round the last island and set a course due east, a large dark stain resolves itself into a little town with a minaret or two set on a hillock and backed by the golden dunes and the palms. A forest of naked masts and yards lies out on the lake; it is the fleet of Baltim, the chief settlement of the Burullos fisher-folk, and old episcopal see of Parallos, whose sound, corrupted on Arab lips, makes the modern name.

So flat is the lake floor that a great way from the margin the water is still but inches deep, and the grounded feluccas discharge their freight on to the backs of camels, which are trained against Nature both to receive their loads standing and to plash unconcerned a mile out in the inland sea. So far out also as to be dimly seen, naked children roam all day and every day, plying in either hand tiny javelins or little casting-nets, fishing as their first forefathers fished; and I have seen no healthier or happier babies than this amphibious brood, whose playground is the lagoon. The fathers and mothers also seem to pass their days al fresco on the great expanse of sandy beach, coopering boats, buying and selling fish, chattering, sleeping in the sun. It is astonishing in Egypt to see any life so clean. Here is no longer the Nile mud, a viscous ink when wet and a fouling dust if dry, but the purest ruin of calcareous rocks. Even the huts are not clay-built, but of ancient Roman bricks dug out of the mounds that lie to south of the lagoon, and long ago mellowed to a dusky red which harmonises to admiration with the yellow dunes and the palms. Less solid beehive shelters, byres, and fences are plaited of dry palm-fronds.

It is a most singular bit of Egypt, this long sand-belt, which fences the northern sea-made, for the most part, one must suppose, of the detritus of a barrier range of prehistoric islands, themselves compact of such a soft limestone as that on which Alexandria is built. Coming into it out of the great Nile-flats, one thinks it a veritable highland, and climbing painfully over the sliding dunes hardly notes that every deeper hollow falls again to the Nile level. Yet so it is; and therefore palms may be planted deep, and they will bear abundantly, though the dunes, in their constant eastward progression, bury them to the

VOL. XVIII.-NO. 105, N.S.

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spring of their plumes. In the troughs of the sand-waves potatoes and tomatoes are grown behind long alignments of sheltering wattles; nor is a wild waxy pasture wanting, whose roots trail to incredible length, even to fifty or sixty feet, through the sand to seek the ground moisture which somewhere will not fail them. You may find a similar tract by taking train from Alexandria towards Rosetta, and see a village like Baltim in Edku by its lake; but there is no view west of the Nile to rival that from the higher dunes of Burullos; nothing like that great forest of sand-choked palms in the hollow that lies between the lake dunes and the higher golden range by the open sea; nothing like the ample prospect of the Lake Burullos itself, with its northern fringe of fisher-settlements, its beach alive with fishingfolk, and its waters dotted with their hulls and sails. It is no longer familiar Egypt, as one knows it, but a land of even more primæval life and even less change.

The agents of change, however, are abroad, and the time is not far off when the limits of cultivation will be pushed northward as far as the southern shores of the lake. That is as far as they were pushed eighteen hundred years ago by Imperial Rome. And perhaps the time is not so much farther off when the lake itself will be cut off from the sea and its bed drained and parcelled out into arable plots, suffering the same change that in the past ten years has come over the lagoon of Aboukir and now threatens that of Edku. The severest critics of British rule in Egypt admit that at least it has resulted in certain ameliorations of the lot of the agricultural Egyptian-in his having better security of tenure and a larger enjoyment of the fruits of his labour. Nor, again, is it denied that we are improving his food and the sanitary conditions under which he has to live. We may fairly take credit, then, (if credit there be) for two consequences of these ameliorations—for the steady increase in population and the obvious growth of a land-hunger among the people. The one is pushing a growing proportion of the fellahin out of their native villages, the other inducing the surplus to make, not for the towns, but for the unappropriated arable lands. The vacuum which sucks that surplus nowadays is the Northern Delta. There alone, in the strait and teeming valley of the Nile, is yet room and to spare; and there will be seen in the near future the greatest expansion and modification of Nature by man.

THE FRANKFORT FLEET.

ONCE and only once in history has there been a real parliament of professors: it met in a church in Germany, and it meant to reform the world-through the medium of Germany. The events which produced this political phenomenon are as a rule practically unknown to even well-informed Englishmen; and yet they had much to do with the formation of that great industrial and political Germany which bulks so large in our national outlook to-day. There was a real revolution in the Fatherland in 1848. It was not indeed, a' fool-fury of the Seine': there were no 'noyades,' no theatrical slayings of princes, no 'thermidors,' and no 'émigrés to speak of. The worst penalty exacted from recalcitrant princes was that of a compulsory stay in England: which was after all a great deal better for themselves and for the purses of their subjects than the usual season at Spa or Homburg. But there was a very real and very righteous uprising of a people oppressed by feudal follies and petty despotisms to an extent which we can hardly conceive nowadays to have existed within the memory of men yet living.

The wave of rebellion broke, as it seemed, ineffectually against the iron power of Prussia-selfishness, both national and individual,' had robbed it of its force; and the crushing of the revolution was far more bloody than the inception of it. But in this harmless Jacquerie the principal instigators had most undoubtedly been the professors. Ordinary and extraordinary, they had boldly faced the extremities of persecution for the propagation of doctrines of liberty which seemed like a sick man's dreams to many who heard. The present Imperial Government is credited with deft ways of dealing with recalcitrant educators; but its methods are as whips to the scorpions with which the petty potentates of the

The writer had once the honour of the acquaintance of an insurgent captain of '48; he was a prosperous Bavarian innkeeper in '80. 'I led my troops,' he said, 'to the field of battle,' and he sighed. And what then?' 'I left them there.' *You left them there?' 'Naturally; I was a married man with children: most of my men were young.' 'And what happened to them?' Ach, die armen, armen Leute!' he said, 'the Prussians took them out and set them up against a wall, and shot them all. Ach! die armen Leute!' and he wept. He was probably referring to the so-called battle of Ubstadt-a mere massacre.