THE ROMANTIC NILE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 986, 4 March 1910, Page 4

THE ROMANTIC NILE.

To "look before and after" is no longer the exclusive privilege of the poet. Novelists and magazine essayists have discovered that to win a hearing to day you must chiefly discuss the things of to-morrow* or yesterday. when our periodicals are not treating the future of flying machines, they are going back upon the habits and customs of past civilisations, or turning up. some new item from the world's old almanac of many thousand years ago. In the last number of "Harper's Maga zine" there was an article which decided a much-debated question, the precise site of Sodom; and also settled, on the authority of the latest geographical expedition, at what address Lot was to be found when he "dwelt in the mountain in a cave.' The latest "Windsor" attracts attention by a picture o* Moses and the bulrushes, and we find that Mr H. Rider Haggard has been moved by recent tomb explosions to write a very pleasant impressionist paper on "The Romance of the Ancient Nile." He traces the influence of the;river| : on the ancient Egyptian.), as art and

industry and religion developed enough to remain on record. "From its shallows they drew their supplies i of fish, and in its swamps they hunted wild fowl or killed them with their arrows and' throwing clubs. It was their great highway by which they travelled north, and south; from it they even drew their metaphors." The king who fancied his own exploits would describe himself as I having been "A Nile for his people" that is, a source of wealth and abundance; and the courtier who knew his business would be overheard occasionally applauding the monarch as "a full Nile every day, making j Egypt live." The Nile herself com- J - binad the functions of a god and an j 1 industrious river-of-all-work. War, \\ pomp, agriculture, and commerce, j j all depended upon her useful waters./! 1

( Even the blocks that built the Pyra- \ mids are said to have been floated to their ultimate step during a time o£ inundation. Rider Haggard follows the career of a Pharoah to the lasfe:" solemn journey, when the embalmed king waa laid to rest on the western bank, amongst other regal sleepers,} in a scented silence, each watched byits own particular *ka,' or ghost,' With this is contrasted the modern anti-clima x, "in the shape of a vulgar? and the removal to that "hone of desecration," tha j British Museuir. The mummy trafficof to-day must certainly vex the ghost both of the-ancient king and the romantic historian; and yet^ . without the tomb-breaker, how much' would anyone have known about tha . I romance of the Nile?