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 being savage, is singularly austere. Its chief episode is the great temple of Abousir, which with its attendant beacon-tower stands so magnificently upon the coastal ridge. And inland lie the marble basilicas of St. Menas and his holy well. But these apart, there is nothing to catch the attention. The tents of the Bedouins, so Mongolian in outline, seldom cut the lines of the sky, but blend in colour with the stone, against which they crouch. The quarries, vast and romantic, lie hidden in the flanks of the limestone. They do not play the part that a chalk-pit does in the landscape of the Sussex downs. The place is not a wilderness, it is a working concern. But it is essentially solitary, and only once a year does it, for a brief space, put its solitude away, and blossom.
There is nothing there of the ordered progress of the English spring, with its slow extension from wood-anemones through primroses into the buttercups of June. The flowers come all of a rush. One week there is nothing but spikes and buds, then the temperature rises or the wind drops, and whole tracts turn lilac or scarlet. They scarcely wait for their leaves, they are in such a hurry, and many of them blossom like little footstools, close to the ground. They do not keep their times. They scarcely keep their places, and you may look in vain for them this season where you found them last. There is a certain tract of yellow marigolds that I suspect of migration. One year it was in a quarry, the next by the railway line, now it has flown a distance of five and a half miles and unfolded its carpet on the slopes beneath Abousir. All is confusion and hurry. The white tassels of garlic that wave in the shadow of the temple may be fallen to-morrow, the blue buds of the borage never have time to unfold. The pageant passes like the waving of a handkerchief, but in compensation without the lumber that attends the passing of an English spring, no stalks and reluctant exits of half-dead leaves. As it came, so it goes. It has been more like a ray of coloured light playing on the earth than the work of the earth herself, and if one had not picked a few of the flowers and entombed them in vases upon an Alexandrian mantelpiece, they could seem afterwards like the growths of a dream.
It would require a botanist to do justice to these flowers, but fortunately there is no occasion to do justice to flowers. They are not Government officials. Let their titles and duties remain for the most part unknown. The most permanent of them are, oddly enough, the asphodels, whose coarse stems and turbid venous blossoms have disappointed many who dreamt of the Elysian Fields. How came the Greeks to plant so buxom a bulb in the solitary place they imagined beyond the grave—that place which though full of philosophers and charioteers remains for ever empty? The asphodel is built to resist rough winds and to stand on the slopes of an earthly hill. It is too heavy for the hands of ghosts, too harsh for their feet, but perhaps ours were not the asphodels the Greeks planted, and their ghosts may have walked upon what we call Stars of Bethlehem. The marigolds are solid too, but for the most part the flora are very delicate, and their colours aerial. There is a tiny vetch that hesitates between terracotta and claret. There is a scented yellow flower the size of flax which is only found in one part of the district and which closes in the evening when the irises unfold. Two of these irises are dwarf, and coloured purple and deep blue; a third is larger and china blue. There are tracts of night-scented stock. Down in the quarries grows a rock plant with a dull red spire and a fleshy leaf that almost adheres to the stone. As for the shrubs, some have transparent joints that look filled with wine; while from the woolly fibre of others jut buttons like a blue scabious. Other blue plants wave their heads in the barley. Mignonette, purple and white anemones, scarlet and yellow ranunculus, scarlet poppies, coltsfoot and dwarf orange marigolds, nettles genuine and false, henbane, mallows, celandine, hen and chickens, lords and ladies, convolvulus. English daisies I do not remember. And many of these flowers are not the varieties we know in England. The lords and ladies, for instance, are smaller and thrust up their pale green spoons in the open ground. While, to compensate, there is a larger kind—an arum of great size with a coal-black sheath and clapper—a positively Satanic plant, such as Des Esseintes would have commanded for his conservatory. In this way, just here and there, the tropic note is struck, and reminds us that these familiar and semi-familiar flowers are after all growing in Africa, and that those swelling hills stretch southwards towards the heart of the dark continent.
But what impresses one most in the scene is the quiet persistence of the earth. There is so little soil about and she does so much with it. Year after year she has given this extraordinary show to a few Bedouins, has covered the Mareotic civilization with dust and raised flowers from its shards. Will she do the same to our own tins and barbed wire? Probably not, for man has now got so far ahead of other forms of life that he will scarcely permit the flowers to grow over his works again. His old tins will be buried under new tins. This is the triumph of civilization, I suppose, the final imprint of the human upon this devoted planet, which should exhibit in its apotheosis a solid crust of machinery and graves. In cities one sees this development coming, but in solitary places, however austere, the primaeval softness persists, the vegetation still flowers and seeds unchecked, and the air still blows untainted hot from the land or cold from the sea. I have tried to describe this Mariout country as it is at the beginning of March, when the earth makes her great effort. In a few days the wind may scratch and tear the blossoms, in a few weeks the sun will scorch the leaves. The spongeous red growth of the ice-plant endures longest and further empurples the hills. This too will dry up and the bones of the limestone reappear. Then all will be quiet till the first winter rain, when the camels will be driven out to surface-plough. A rectangle is outlined on the soil and scattered with seed barley. Then the camel will shuffle up and down dragging after him a wooden plough that looks like a half-open penknife, and the Bedouin, guiding it, will sing tunes to the camel that he can only sing to the camel, because in his mind the tune and the camel are the same thing.