The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0000/00003.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 26KB | 395 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00003}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Cleopatra, Queen Of Egypt
Chapter I: The Valley Of The Nile}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Abbott, Jacob}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{sea
water
valley
miles
egypt
land
nile
rain
thus
upon}
$Date{1900}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Cleopatra, Queen Of Egypt
Book:        Cleopatra
Author:      Abbott, Jacob
Date:        1900

Chapter I: The Valley Of The Nile

     The story of Cleopatra is a story of crime.  It is a narrative of the
course and the consequences of unlawful love.  In her strange and romantic
history we see this passion portrayed with the most complete and graphic
fidelity in all its influences and effects; its uncontrollable impulses, its
intoxicating joys, its reckless and mad career, and the dreadful remorse and
ultimate despair and ruin in which it always and inevitably ends.

     Cleopatra was by birth an Egyptian; by ancestry and descent she was a
Greek.  Thus, while Alexandria and the delta of the Nile formed the scene of
the most important events and incidents of her history, it was the blood of
Macedon which flowed in her veins.  Her character and action are marked by the
genius, the courage, the originality, and the impulsiveness pertaining to the
stock from which she sprung.  The events of her history, on the other hand and
the peculiar character of her adventures her sufferings, and her sins, were
determined by the circumstances with which she was surrounded, and the
influences which were brought to bear upon her in the soft and voluptuous
clime where the scenes of her early life were laid.

     Egypt has always been considered as physically the most remarkable
country on the globe.  It is a long and narrow valley of verdure and
fruitfulness, completely insulated from the rest of the habitable world.  It
is more completely insulated, in fact, than any literal island could be,
inasmuch as deserts are more impassable than seas.  The very existence of
Egypt is a most extraordinary phenomenon.  If we could but soar with the wings
of an eagle into the air, and look down upon the scene, so as to observe the
operation of that grand and yet simple process by which this long and
wonderful valley, teeming so profusely with animal and vegetable life, has
been formed, and is annually revivified and renewed, in the midst of
surrounding wastes of silence, desolation, and death, we should gaze upon it
with never-ceasing admiration and pleasure.  We have not the wings of the
eagle, but the generalizations of science furnish us with a sort of substitute
for them.  The long series of patient, careful, and sagacious observations,
which have been continued now for two thousand years, bring us results, by
means of which, through our powers of mental conception, we may take a
comprehensive survey of the whole scene, analogous, in some respects, to that
which direct and actual vision would afford us, if we could look down upon it
from the eagle's point of view.  It is, however, somewhat humiliating to our
pride of intellect to reflect that long-continued philosophical investigations
and learned scientific research are, in such a case as this, after all, in
some sense, only a sort of substitute for wings.  A human mind connected with
a pair of eagle's wings would have solved the mystery of Egypt in a week;
whereas science, philosophy, and research, confined to the surface of the
ground, have been occupied for twenty centuries in accomplishing the
undertaking.

     It is found at last that both the existence of Egypt itself, and its
strange insulation in the midst of boundless tracts of dry and barren sand,
depend upon certain remarkable results of the general laws of rain.  The water
which is taken up by the atmosphere from the surface of the sea and of the
land by evaporation, falls again, under certain circumstances, in showers of
rain, the frequency and copiousness of which vary very much in different
portions of the earth.  As a general principle, rains are much more frequent
and abundant near the equator than in temperate climes, and they grow less and
less so as we approach the poles.  This might naturally have been expected;
for, under the burning sun of the equator, the evaporation of water must
necessarily go on with immensely greater rapidity than in the colder zones,
and all the water which is taken up must, of course, again come down.

     It is not, however, wholly by the latitude of the region in which the
evaporation takes place that the quantity of rain which falls from the
atmosphere is determined; for the condition on which the falling back, in
rain, of the water which has been taken up by evaporation mainly depends, is
the cooling of the atmospheric stratum which contains it; and this effect is
produced in very various ways, and many different causes operate to modify it.
Sometimes the stratum is cooled by being wafted over ranges of mountains;
sometimes by encountering and becoming mingled with cooler currents of air;
and sometimes, again, by being driven in winds toward a higher, and,
consequently, cooler latitude.  If, on the other hand, air moves from cold
mountains toward warm and sunny plains, or from higher latitudes to lower, or
if, among the various currents into which it falls, it becomes mixed with air
warmer than itself, its capacity for containing vapor in solution is
increased, and, consequently, instead of releasing its hold upon the waters
which it has already in possession, it becomes thirsty for more.  It moves
over a country, under these circumstances, as a warm and drying wind.  Under a
reverse of circumstances it would have formed drifting mists, or, perhaps,
even copious showers of rain.

     It will be evident, from these considerations, that the frequency of the
showers, and the quantity of the rain which will fall, in the various regions
respectively which the surface of the earth presents, must depend on the
combined influence of many causes, such as the warmth of the climate, the
proximity and the direction of mountains and of seas, the character of the
prevailing winds, and the reflecting qualities of the soil.  These and other
similar causes, it is found, do, in fact, produce a vast difference in the
quantity of rain which falls in different regions.  In the northern part of
South America, where the land is bordered on every hand by vast tropical seas,
which load the hot and thirsty air with vapor, and where the mighty Cordillera
of the Andes rears its icy summits to chill and precipitate the vapors again,
a quantity of rain amounting to more than ten feet in perpendicular height
falls in a year.  At St. Petersburg, on the other hand, the quantity thus
falling in a year is but little more than one foot.  The immense deluge which
pours down from the clouds in South America would, if the water were to remain
where it fell, wholly submerge and inundate the country.  As it is, in flowing
off through the valleys to the sea, the united torrents form the greatest
river on the globe - the Amazon; and the vegetation, stimulated by the heat,
and nourished by the abundant and incessant supplies of moisture, becomes so
rank and loads the earth with such an entangled and matted mass of trunks, and
stems, and twining wreaths and vines, that man is almost excluded from the
scene.  The boundless forests become a vast and almost impenetrable jungle,
abandoned to wild beasts, noxious reptiles, and huge and ferocious birds of
prey.

     Of course, the district of St. Petersburg, with its icy winter, its low
and powerless sun, and its twelve inches of annual rain, must necessarily
present, in all its phenomena of vegetable and animal life, a striking
contrast to the exuberant prolificness of New Grenada.  It is, however, after
all, not absolutely the opposite extreme.  There are certain regions on the
surface of the earth that are actually rainless; and it is these which present
us with the true and real contrast to the luxuriant vegetation and teeming
life of the country of the Amazon.  In these rainless regions all is
necessarily