p. 508 | The Nile

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 19, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 32.

The Nile.

PERHAPS the most striking idea of the effect of the Nile water is obtained from standing on the summit of the Great Pyramid of Geezeh. The pyramid stands on the desert, but close to the cultivated soil; the cultivated soil in this case means the land which has been covered by the inundation of the great river. To the height which its waters have reached, the color is green from vegetation; where it has not touched, is desert. So distinct is the line of green from the buff-colored sand, that, looking down from the pyramid, it seems as if you could put one foot on the cultivated and another on the unirrigated ground. The sharply defined edge of a well-kept lawn and a gravel path will picture the state of the case to the mind of any one. Gazing on this from the pyramid—and it can be seen as far as the eye can reach to north and south—the importance of the Nile water is realized. As high as the inundation rises there is growth and cultivation; food for man and beast is produced. Where the water has not moved on the surface, there is the desert, sterile and bare, with a hot, monotonous sun glaring everywhere. The essential cause of Egypt's greatness in the past is realized, as well as the continued political importance of the country to our own times.

In other days the overflow of the Nile was looked upon as the union of Isis and Osiris; and when the canals were opened in ancient times to let the water flow over the land, sacrifices are said to have been offered. A ceremony is yet performed which is supposed to have descended from these rites. It is now known under the Arab title of "Haroost e' Neel," or "The Bride of the Nile."

The young, devoted bride Of the fierce Nile, when, decked in all the pride Of nuptial pomp, she sinks into the tide. —Lalla Rookh.

A pillar of mud now represents the bride; it is made at the opening of one of the canals at Old Cairo, and it is swept away by the waters at the opening of the dam. The Mohammedan tradition is that one of their rulers substituted the mud pillar for a virgin, which the Christians sacrificed every year. Sir Gardner Wilkinson doubts, and believes that in 638 A. D. the Arabs continued the custom from the Christians, who received it from the Egyptians. He thinks it unlikely that the Christians would sacrifice a human being, and that it is quite possible that the Bride of the Nile was only a mud figure, even in the older Egyptian period.

This ceremony is now gone through about the 10th of August, when the inundation is supposed to be approaching its highest. The first indications of the rise appear in Lower Egypt about the middle of June, and continue till September, when the full overflow is reached. In November or December again, the waters have disappeared, and the Nile is generally reduced to its ordinary level. The ancient Egyptians were in the habit of closing up the dams after the full rise, so as to retain the water on the fields, and thus secure a fuller deposit of mud, as well as a longer continuance of the fertilizing element. The White Nile sends down the largest amount of water for the inundation; but it is the Blue Nile which supplies the most important material for the alluvial deposit, and which is of such value to the crops. It is this deposit which has been slowly raising the level of the surface of Egypt—a rise which has been very exactly determined of late years. It was first observed in the case of the Memnon statues, and in the obelisk which still stands at Heliopolis; the bases of these monuments, remaining as fixed points, were clear evidences of the rise of the soil. Sir Gardner Wilkinson puts it that at Elephantine the rise has been nine feet, and at Thebes seven feet in seventeen hundred years, about four inches in a century. There have been many learned efforts to show that this increased elevation has led to a decrease in the height of the inundations, but the authority above referred to gives it as his opinion that the rise of the Nile is now the same as in former times.—London News.