An Egyptian Village in the Age of Justinian

If you should ever attempt to motor from Assiût southwards to Baliana and Luxor—an enterprise I do not recommend, for the roads are vile—and, after some twenty-five miles of bumping and shaking, should decide, as my companion decided, to try your luck on the opposite side of the Nile Valley, you will come, after a few miles of a straight but evil road leading west, to another which runs southward again beside a canal separated by about a hundred yards of sandy plain from the great cliffs which form the escarpment of the Libyan Desert. The road which you have reached is no better than the one you have left, the dogs of the district are of a ferocity I found nowhere else in Egypt, and the human inhabitants are surly and hostile; but the natural amenities are considerable. The ordinary Egyptian canal, and so, by consequence, the road which normally runs along it, stretches without a bend for miles, but this particular canal at this point, conforming to the line of the cliffs, which here swing out eastwards, curves round in a great arc, and the road follows. The bank is shaded by a long line of palm-trees, and the view westwards, the reddish-brown trunks and feathery green fronds of the palms seen against a background of yellow sand and red cliffs, is delightful. Turning to the east one sees, stretched out in long perspective, the utter flatness of the Nile valley, clothed in the exquisite green of the young crops, out of which villages rise here and there like islands in a great lake. One such village, seen not far from the road shortly after we have turned to the south, makes a particularly charming effect.