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Updated: May 6, 2025
Facing the green island of Elephantine and the golden sand-drifts which cover the low range of hills across the river, Assuan stretches along the river-bank, its white buildings partly screened by the avenue of palms and lebbek-trees which shade its principal street, while to the north are dense groves of date-palms, past which the Nile sweeps in a splendid curve and is lost to sight among the hills.
The red after-glow was in the western sky, and it mottled the broad, smooth river with crimson. Dimly they could discern the tall figures of herons standing upon the sand-banks, and farther off the line of riverside date-palms glided past them in a majestic procession.
From the quay we make our way to the Largo del Municipio, a typical square of a provincial town in the South, enclosed by shabby houses and adorned by a couple of stunted date-palms and a battered marble fountain, around which numberless children and some slatternly women noisily converse or dispute.
Oh, those date-palms!" Mrs. Steele leans out of her window, full of delight at the curious panorama moving past. "Mrs. Steele!" I bend over and take her hand. "I hope all this will never grow dim. I want to remember it all my life." "You will, dear." She turns away absorbed, eager to lose nothing of this new phase of Nature. "Haf no fear you vill not forget Blanca."
And this?" she thrust her toe into a thick, lustrous bed of tiny leaves that hugged the ground. "No, again? That's kinnikinnick. Oh, my poor boy, you have everything to learn. Brought up in the country, too!" "But, really," said Cope in defense, "Freeford isn't so small as that. And even in the country one may turn by preference to books. Try me on primroses and date-palms and pomegranates!"
These people pay taxes, too." "Really? Isn't there any spot on the globe where people can just live as they like, where they can get away from income-tax and authorities?" "I don't know if the Bedouins pay any tent-taxes, but I suppose that if they didn't aspire to owning date-palms, they could live in the arid desert without paying anybody anything. It's the old, old, unchanging subject water."
Very Asiatic in appearance is Alcudia as one approaches it, with its yellow and white houses, its domes, its crumbling amber walls, with ragged date-palms scattered here and there, and dusty green clumps of prickly pear scrawming about everywhere. But as a walled city its days are done. The massive gateway with its pitting of Saracen round-shot has no guard.
What if there be another noble deed to be done, before I see the sunny hills of Hellas? So he went east, and east for ever, by fresh oases and fountains, date-palms, and lawns of grass, till he saw before him a mighty mountain-wall, all rose-red in the setting sun.
If we then examine the Miocene formations of the same country, exotic forms become more abundant, especially the palms, whether they belong to the European or American fan-palms, Chamaerops and Sabal, or to the more tropical family of the date-palms or Phoenicites, which last are conspicuous in the Lower Miocene beds of Central Europe.
It was the first week of November, high Nile had not subsided, and all the land here, between the river and the sand where the Sphinx keeps watch, was hidden beneath the vast and tranquil waters of what seemed a tideless sea a sea fringed with dense masses of date-palms, girdled in the far distance by palm-trees that kept the white and the brown houses in their feathery embrace.
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