ABSTRACT
On our right we passed the village of Esbeh, built of unbaked bricks, where there are the remains of an ancient mosque and some fragments of arches and towers which once belonged to the old Damietta, destroyed by the Arabs at the time of Saint Louis, because it was too much exposed to sudden attack. Once the sea bathed the walls of this city, but now it is a league away. So much space the land of Egypt gains every six hundred years. The caravans which cross the desert on their way to Syria come from time to time upon regular lines of ancient ruins buried in the sands, whose shape the desert wind sometimes deigns to outline. These spectral cities, stripped for a moment of their dusty shrouds, terrify the imaginative Arabs, who attribute their construction to genii. European scholars, who have examined them more closely, have rediscovered a series of cities built on the seashore by one dynasty or another of peasant 213kings or Theban conquerors. It is by calculating the extent of these withdrawals of the sea, as well as by the different layers of the Nile ooze, which can be traced by excavation and counted, that the antiquity of Egypt has been taken back forty thousand years. This may, perhaps, not seem to agree too well with Genesis; but these long centuries, given over to the interaction of land and water, have built up what the sacred book calls " matter without form," the organisation of living creatures being the only true principle of creation.
