Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/215

palm trees and mud villages, a perpetual panorama of long levels of greenest verdure, broken every here and there by reaches of yellow sandbank, with an eternal foreground of bright-blue river and an everlasting background of grey or red gold mountains, it would be idle to gainsay him. If that is all that there seems to him to be on the Nile, then that is all that the Nile is—for him. A palm-tree "by the river brim" has no more charm—for the wrong sort of eye—than a primrose in the same situation. Nay, if any man fails to find a beauty in the very monotony, as he would doubtless call it, of this stately plumed procession sweeping slowly past him for six hundred miles of river—if he does not feel to the very core of his being their indefinable harmony with man and nature in these regions, their indissoluble affinity with the wilderness which they fringe, and with the ancient world-relics amid which they stand, the attempt to impress him with it would be vain. But if by chance he does