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"Poor fellow, you've all done him a great injustice, but I'm thankful he's not going to suffer for it. I wonder if he and his people are bound the same way we are?" I feared that this was likely to be the case, as we were going the conventional round, sticking as one might say to suburban desert, on our way to the Fayum.
Such is the tale told by Herodotus, and it is a tale which has considerably embarrassed our modern engineers and topographers. How, in fact, was it possible to find in the Fayûm a site which could have contained a basin measuring at least ninety miles in circumference?
The numerous embroidered winding sheets with woven borders which have recently been discovered near Ekhmîm, and in the Fayûm, are nearly all from Coptic tombs, and are more nearly akin to Byzantine art than to the art of Egypt.
From a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles above Fayum on the left bank of the Nile is Siut, where Ramses XIII took a rest of two days. He was even obliged to halt there, for the mummy of the late pharaoh was still in Abydos, where they were making solemn prayers at the grave of Osiris. Siut was one of the richest parts of Upper Egypt.
Without speaking of the ruins of Abû Roash or Zowyet el Aryan, which have not been studied closely enough, they naturally form six groups, distributed from north to south on the border of the Libyan plateau, from Gizeh to the Fayûm, by Abûsîr, Sakkarah, Dahshûr, and Lisht.
Now a land of roses, of the vine, olive, sugar-cane, and cotton, where the orange and lemon plants attain the size of our apple-trees, it was in primeval times an arid depression of the stony and sandy Libyan waste." North of the Fayum the Nile flows on to Cairo, where the narrow water way allowed to its course by the two lines of cliffs widens, and the cliffs recede to the right and left.
I no longer felt inclined to commit suicide because I could remember nothing about Egypt except that the Delta was shaped like a lily, with the Fayum for a bud, and the Nile for its stem: that Alexander the Macedonian defeated Darius the Persian B. C. three hundred and something; that ancient Egyptians loved beer, but were forbidden to eat beans.
The old town, now entirely vanished, was second in size to Fostat, and was the chief centre of the Arabian trade. The distance of Kus from Fayum is about 300 miles. E. Naville has identified the ruins of Tell-el-Maskhuta near Ismailieh with Pithom, the treasure city mentioned in Exodus i. 11.
The water of the Nile from being ruddy became brownish, and in August, the month of Hator, it reached one half its height. The sluices were opened on the banks of the river, and the water began to fill the canals quickly, and also the gigantic artificial lake, Moeris, in the province Fayum, celebrated for the beauty of its roses.
"I cannot win these men by anything," thought the pharaoh, "but I will give them a decision of the assembly, and a decision of Amon." WHEN he left Fayum the pharaoh and his retinue advanced southward a number of days up the Nile, surrounded by a throng of boats, greeted by shouts, and covered with flowers.
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