My Winter on the Nile

The two banks of the river keep all day about the same relative character—the one sterile, the other rich. On the east, the brown sand licks down almost to the water; there is only a strip of green; there are few trees, and habitations only at long intervals. Only a little distance back are the Mokattam hills, which keep a rarely broken and level sky-line for two hundred and fifty miles south of Cairo.