Edwards, Amelia B.: A thousand miles up the Nile (New York, [1888])

MINIEH TO SIUT. 97

marriages, that after the third generation the foreign blood
seems to be eliminated, while the traits of the race are
restored to their original purity.

These are but a few instances of the startling con-
servatism of Egypt—a conservatism which interested me
particularly, and to which I shall frequently have occasion
to return.

Each nome or province of ancient Egypt had its sacred
animals; and Siut was called Lycopolis by the Greeks*
because the wolf (now almost extinct in the land) was there
held in the same kind of reverence as the cat at Bubastis,
the crocodile at Ombos, and the lion at Leontopolis.
Mummy-wolves are, or used to be, found in the smaller
tombs about the mountain, as well as mummy-jackals;
Anubis, the jackal-headed god. being the presiding deity
of the district. A mummied jackal from this place, curi-
ously wrapped in striped bandages, is to be seen in the first
Egyptian room at the British Museum.

But the view from the mountain above Siut is finer than
its tombs and more ancient than its mummies. Seen from
within the great doorway of the second grotto, it looks
like a framed picture. For the foreground, we have a
dazzling slope of limestone debris; in the.middle distance,
a wide plain clothed with the delicious tender green of
very yourgcorn; farther away yet, the cupolas and minarets
of Siut rising from the midst of a belt of palm-groves; be-
yond these again, the molten gold of the great river glit-
tering away, coil after coil, into the far distance; and all
along the horizon the everlasting boundary of the desert.
Large pools of placid water left by the last inundation lie
here and there, like lakes amid the green. A group of
brown men are wailing yonder with their nets. A funeral
comes along the embanked road—the bier carried at a
rapid pace on men's shoulders and covered with a red
shawl; the women taking up handfuls of dust and scatter-
ing it upon their heads as they walk. We can see the dust
flying and hear their shrill wail borne upon the breathless
air. The cemetery toward which they are going lies round
to the left, at the foot of the mountain—a wilderness of
little white cupolas, with here and there a tree. Broad

* The Greeks translated the sacred names of Egyptian places; the
Copts adopted the civil names.