A Californian circling the globe . e bringing nothing, butevery woman had something on her head—a basket of grain,chickens in a basket, dates, vegetables, eggs, butter, driedlentils, split beans, sugar cane, buffalo cream and many otherthings. Some of the men had asses and camels loaded withproduce, others old and gray were walking along leaningon a cane, as perhaps for fifty years they had never misseda market day, and their fathers did the same before. Theyhad very little clothing to bother them. Most of these coun-try people dress in black, buying the cotton cloth and dyeingwhat little they
A Californian circling the globe . e bringing nothing, butevery woman had something on her head—a basket of grain,chickens in a basket, dates, vegetables, eggs, butter, driedlentils, split beans, sugar cane, buffalo cream and many otherthings. Some of the men had asses and camels loaded withproduce, others old and gray were walking along leaningon a cane, as perhaps for fifty years they had never misseda market day, and their fathers did the same before. Theyhad very little clothing to bother them. Most of these coun-try people dress in black, buying the cotton cloth and dyeingwhat little they wear at home. After riding two or three miles, with groves of palm treesand water surrounded villages on each side, we came to ruins,where regular hills of them were heaped up completely full ofbroken pottery, pieces of brick, broken potsherds, and frag-ments of limestone. Other heaps, some of them forty feethigh and covering two or three acres, were scattered about inthis palm tree forest. They looked like gigantic dust heaps,. NATIVES GOING TO MARKET AT MEMPHIS EIGHT HUNDRED MILES UP THE NILE. 231 and on their surface only stunted palms grew. Great ex-cavations have been made in these heaps, yet they are all ofthe same appearance. Was it some great convulsion of na-ture that produced this singular appearance? Desolationreigned supreme. The reason it did is because thousands ofyears ago certain prophets in the Bible foretold that a citythey called Noph would perish. This word is simply theEgyptian for Memphis, and we were standing on the oldsite of Memphis. A king of Egypt named Menes foundedthis city. The most we know about ancient Memphis is thatHerodotus wrote of it about 450 B. C. In his writings weare told that Menes changed the course of the Nile in orderthat this city might be built by its side. Menes is of thefirst dynasty of Egyptian kings, and it is claimed by manychronologists that his time is 4000 years B. C. Do not getdizzy over these figures, yet remember that
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, booksubjectvoyagesandtravels
