THE SOLITARY PLACE
Delicate yet august, the country that stretches westward from the expiring waters of Lake Mariout is not easy to describe. Though it contains accredited Oriental ingredients, such as camels, a mirage, and Bedouins, and though it remounts to a high antiquity, yet I cannot imagine our powerful professional novelists getting to work at it, and extracting from its quiet recesses hot tales about mummies and sin. Its basis is a soft limestone, which rises on the seaward side into two well-defined and parallel ridges, and swells inland into gentle hills whose outlines and colouring often suggest a Scotch moor: the whole district has a marked tendency to go purple, especially in its hollows—into that sombre brownish purple that may be caused by moorland growths. Many of the bushes are like flowerless heather. In the lower ground barley is cultivated, and depends for its success upon an occasional violent thunderstorm which shall swill a sudden torrent off the hills. The ancients cultivated vines and olives here too, as the remains of their presses prove, and Cleopatra had a garden here, but from such luxuries the soil has desisted. It has beat a general retreat from civilization, and the spirit of the place, without
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