The Climate of Egypt and The Delights of Nile Water

The Climate of Egypt, 1882
Samuel Cox

Climate of Egypt

Its climate is balm itself. It is dry. The mud thus survives all its changes. In winter its mildness is a salutary luxury. These features of the climate result from the position of Egypt. It is in the north-east corner of Africa; yet it is not African in its ordinary meaning. It is a small comer of Africa physically; but neither are its people nor its position African. Egypt is the Nile. The Nile made it the cradle of human thought and progress, and the Nile plays for it even yet an important part in civilization. The Nile has created its limits and gifted it with opulence. The Delta, whose apex is near old Memphis and modem Cairo, is the creature of the river. The northern side of the Delta country made by the river is 160 miles along the Mediterranean. From its southern boundary on Nubia, where the templed isles of Philae and Elephantine divide the waters of the foaming river, you have a sweeping stream 550 miles in length; but the fruitfulness it engenders is straitened within a valley, seldom more than seven to ten miles wide. Mountains or hills of sandstone or rock, shut in this strip from the invading sands of the desert.

The Delights of Nile Water, 1826
John Came
Fatigued with heat and thirst we came to a few cottages in a palm-wood, and stopped to drink of a fountain of delicious water. In this northern climate no idea can be formed of the exquisite luxury of drinking in Egypt: little appetite for food is felt, but when, after crossing the burning sands, you reach the rich line of woods on the brink of the Nile, and pluck the fresh limes, and, mixing their juice with Egyptian sugar and the soft river-water, drink repeated bowls of lemonade, you feel that every other pleasure of the sense must yield to this. One then perceives the beauty and force of those similes in Scriptures, where the sweetest emotions of the heart are compared to the assuaging of thirst in a sultry land.

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