BY D. G. HOGARTH.

The fenland of the Nile is not visited by the thousands who seek their pleasure winter by winter in Egypt. As they enter from Alexandria a corner of it slips by as the train gathers speed for the run to Damanhour, and all the later wonders of the valley seldom efface that first impression of the Delta—the long vista of level mere under the sunset, and copper-green fields and anthill villages outlined against an amber sky. The contrary corner can be seen from a hurricane-deck between Port Said and Ismailia, where the silent stretches of marsh open on the right hand, relieved by flocks of long-legged birds which wade far out, or trail like wisps of smoke across the sun. But that is all the tourist sees. He never leaves the beaten tracks to explore the Fens, and no one since Heliodorus has described anything but the fringe of them.

A LAND APART.

They form a land apart from the rest of Egypt, very difficult to penetrate or to traverse even by boat, and inundated by stagnant Waters of the great river, which are dammed by a broad belt of dunes, and contaminated with drainage of salt soils and the insetting sea. On the seaboard itself lies an almost continuous chain of vast lagoons, and for a long day's journey south of these the land will still be found deep marsh, rotten with the overflowing of disused canals and lost arms of the Nile, almost trackless, and only now beginning to undergo here and there the first process of reclamation.

THE FEN FELLAH.

In their present state, as might be expected, the fens have very few inhabitants ; and perhaps none of the sparse settlements, now found within their southern fringe, are much older than the nineteenth century. For almost without exception these have grown up round isolated farmsteads, and still bear the names of local owners of land who were living far to southward not above a generation or two ago. When the Egyptian population under the rule of the last Mameluke Beys was not the half of its present figure, there was little temptation to attempt the conquest of saline and water-logged soils ; and local tradition remembers a not distant epoch—not more distant than Mohamed Ali's day—when all the district was a secure, if uncomfortable, refuge for the broken men who would avoid the tax-gatherer and the conscription-officer had deserted from the battalions that the inexorable Pasha was for ever sending to the conquest of Arabia, the Sudan, or Syria, The repute of the northern marshes remained what it had been in the filth century after Christ, when Heliodorus described, in the opening scene of his

'AETHIOPIC ROMANCE,'

an amphibious outlawed society living there by fishing and raiding ; and some trace of this state of things is still to be discerned in the timid and farouche manner which characterises even now the inhabitants of the few older hamlets. Here alone in modern Egypt fellahi women habitually bar the outer door at sight of a stranger, and children run to hide among the reeds or brushwood, and even grown men met in the way, hold aloof like Bedawis till informed of your character and purpose. Although the animal is certainly not now to be found there, many natives asserted to me that they had seen the wild boar in past years, and twice I came on traditions even of the hippopotamus, traditions held by simple men, who can hardly have derived them from foreign sources. And why not from their fathers ? For there is historical record of a hippopotamus having been killed in the Northern Delta in 1818.

ANCIENT PROSPERITY.

Despite, however, the discouraging face of feu has not always been the desolation it now is ; and it was the knowledge that it had had a more populous past which took me there in the spring of 1903. The maps of it, all imperfect and sketchy as they are, show a number of ill-defined spots whose names are prefaced by kum or tell, sure indication of sites of ancient towns. For the past three years there has been found in Crete proof on proof of communication with Egypt, and where better than in the Northern Delta should its traces be sought beyond the sea ? To be sure nothing reminiscent of Ægean culture had been found in the Lower Delta up to that time; but there remained this unexplored marsh-land, I looked up the authorities. They supplied nothing, not even a mediæval or modern description of the region. All travellers had passed it by and betaken themselves to the higher valley. So I had to go, as to an unknown land, and see for myself ; and, if in the event the things I had hoped to find were not forthcoming, others appeared by the way which I had not been led to expect. To visit the marsh land you may leave the

'BERARI' RAILWAY,

which traverses mid-Delta from Dessouk on the one Nile to Sherbin on the other, at any point, but preferably at Kafres Sheikh or Belkas, for thence roads have been made northward towards the limit of habitation. That is soon reached so far as the great flats are concerned, lying between the three or four main waterways, which are old Nile-arms. But along the farther course of these a few tiny clusters of huts maybe seen to northward. Lower Delta hamlet are built up of mud into such fantastic pepper pot forms as will throw off the frequent rains of the Delta, and, seen afar, suggest nothing so ranch as structures of gigantic building insects. Thereafter nothing lies ahead but the great saline flats, upon which vision is limited only by the curvature of the earth. Their monotonous surface is varied by great tracts of inundation, which dry slowly as the spring ad vances, leaving broad plains reticulated like a crocodile's hide, and always most treacherous where seeming most dry ; for under their thin superficial cake of mud, white with efflorescent salts, lie depths of black saturated sand. . Elsewhere the level is broken by soapy sand-hummocks, heaped round and over shrubs or clumps of reeds ; and among these pool succeeds to slough and slough to pool, and the going for many miles is, at best, worse than that on loose chalk-land at the breaking of a long frost. There is a

SENSATION OF DEATH

in all this spongy land, which exudes water and salt round your heel ; and nothing serves to dispel it—not the many birds, shocking in their tameness as the beasts seen by Alexander Selkirk ; not the myriad insects which assail the traveller who is luckless enough to ride down-wind ; not the teeming life of the ditches ; not the half-wild buffaloes, strayed from southern farmsteads, which you may startle from their wallows and send soughing knee-deep through the slime ; not even that vivifying force of Egypt, the ruffling north wind, tirelessly bowing the strident reeds. Yet with all its monotony and deadness the land exhilarates the traveller ; for the breeze blows hard and clear off the sea and the salt lagoons to northward—hard and clear, in Stevenson's phrase, as through the rigging of a ship—and the flats have the mysterious attraction which is common to all great levels of free horizon. (To be continued).

Kearsley and Cunningham's Weekly Report.

Liverpool, 23 Fébruary. The amount of business in Egyptian cotton has been very limited this week, prices however, in sympathy with Futures, are 1/8 per lb. dearer for both Brown and Upper Egyptian. Spinners report the Yam Market as very unsatisfactory.

In Futures a moderate business has been done; the. following are the closing quotations:-Feb. 6.62 Apl. 6.44 June 6.36 Aug. 6.32 Mar. 6.52 May. 6.38 July 6.33 Nov. 6.23

AMERICAN FUTURES. The Market this week has been fairly active, and prices at one time showed a material advance, but subsequently a sharp reaction occurred, and to-day's closing values are only 2 @4 points above those of last Thursday. The chief features have been the contracted light movements of the crop,and a fresh very large business in Manchester, where spinners and manufacturers have sold their production for many months ahead. An apparent possibility of peace in the near future between Russia and Japan has also exercised a favorable influence; with, however, better better weather conditions in the cotton area there are signs of an increased movement to the ports ; if this should materialise we look lor a more marked" reaction in prices, for today's rates are still something like 1/2 per lb. higher than the lowest touched in December and January. — The latest quotations are :— Delivery :

Feb. 4.01 May/June 4.06 Sept./Oct. 4.12 Feb./Mar. 4.01 June/July 4.08 Oct./Nov. 4.12 Mar./Apl. 4.02 July/Aug. 4.09 Nov./Dcc. 4.12 Apl./May 4.05 Aug., Sep. 4.10

We do not hold ourselves for the responsible opinions expressed by our correspondents, but we wish, in a spirit of fair play to all, to permit - within certain necessary limits - free discussion.

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