Nile River Quotes

And this is the east shore?" Sadie asked. "You said something about that in London--my grandparents living on the east shore." Amos smiled. "Yes. Very good, Sadie. In ancient times, the east bank of the Nile was always the side of the living, the side where the sun rises. The dead were buried west of the river. It was considered bad luck, even dangerous, to live there. The tradition is still strong among... our people." Our people?" I asked, but Sadie muscled in with another question. So you can't live in Manhattan?" she asked. Amos's brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. "Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It's best we stay separate.

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

One of the questions that surprised me most was this: “Mommy, if Jesus comes to live inside my heart, will I explode?” “No!” I proclaimed as the children and I headed to the Nile River for a few of them to be baptized that day. Then I thought about the question a bit more. “Yes, if Jesus comes to live in your heart, you will explode.” That is exactly what we should do if Jesus comes to live inside our hearts. We will explode with love, with compassion, with hurt for those who are hurting, and with joy for those who rejoice. We will explode with a desire to be more, to be better, to be close to the One who made us.

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers. Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso. Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?

Grief was like a memory keeper. It showed me moments I’d forgotten, and I was grateful, even as my stomach hollowed out. I never wanted to forget them, no matter how painful it was to remember.

Everyone deserved a living wage. No human ought to be treated as if their work didn’t matter, or their choices, or their dreams.

That was the smile I didn’t trust—I just knew it came with consequences.

I was sitting in the Temple of Karnak on the Nile, as the sun was going down, and I was all alone, and the great Hypostyle Hall was full of shadows and ghosts of the past, and suddenly I heard this little voice saying "my name is Taita, write my story"… and if you believe that you'll believe anything.

Art should outlive its creator.

Give a smile always, not once a while. Life's great when you wake up and ignore the scaring nightmares you had. Forget the bitter bile; life's sweet beyond River Nile. File your teeth out and smile!

The more I study religion,” he wrote, “the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anyone but himself.

Is this it, Whit?” I whispered. He squeezed me and pressed his lips against mine lightly. “If it is, this where I want to be.

In Egypt? We’re all looking for something.

In Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote that Egypt is the “cradle of mathematics—that is, the country of origin for Greek mathematics.” Some historians believe that when European societies eventually began enslaving Africans, they also started downplaying the major contributions of both the ancient Nile River Valley civilizations and the kemetic culture, as well as concealing its African lineage.

Egypt has been called the Gift of the Nile. Once every year the river overflows its banks, depositing a layer of rich alluvial soil on the parched ground. Then it recedes and soon the whole countryside, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with Egyptologists.

Their death was a truth that was both strange, and yet profoundly ordinary.

Life's always sweeter behind River Nile! Cross it; forget the days of the bitter Bile! Leave the torture behind and give a Smile! Keep smiling; Don't just do it just for a While!

No human ought to be treated as if their work didn’t matter, or their choices, or their dreams.

A light that filled the pit not with the scent of burning sesame oil but with the rich, wet smell of a great river that could only be the Nile.

How melancholy a thing is success,” he would later write. “Whilst failure inspires a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories ‘are shadows, not substantial things.’ 

[Dialogue between Solon and an Egyptian Priest] In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais [...] To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world-about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man," and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age.

The world dimmed, narrowed to the barrel of her weapon. ‘I know you’re the type of person who would leave the safety of the camp with a near stranger, even knowing they carried a weapon.’ I backed away a step. ‘What are you playing at? Lower it.’ Isadora rolled her eyes. ‘Now you’re scared. A little too late, Inez.

Tendrils of mist began to creep into the landscape, like the slow fingers of a dream. They covered the river's surface and blanketed the air so thoroughly that Musashi had to reach down with a pole to reassure himself that he was still on the Nile.

no river in North America except the Mississippi is more powerful than the Columbia; it carries a quarter-million cubic feet of water per second to the ocean, ten times the flow of the Colorado, twice the discharge of the Nile into the Mediterranean.

In some cases, the materials at stake will be viewed as so essential to national survival or economic well-being that compromise is unthinkable. It is difficult, for example, to imagine that the United States will ever allow the Persian Gulf to fall under the control of a hostile power, or that Egypt will allow Sudan or Ethiopia to gain control over the flow of the Nile River. In such situations, national security considerations will always prevail over negotiated settlements that could be perceived as entailing the surrender of vital national interests.

CLEOPATRA TO THE ASP The bright mirror I braved: the devil in it Loved me like my soul, my soul: Now that I seek myself in a serpent My smile is fatal. Nile moves in me; my thighs splay Into the squalled Mediterranean; My brain hides in that Abyssinia Lost armies foundered towards. Desert and river unwrinkle again. Seeming to bring them the waters that make drunk Caesar, Pompey, Antony I drank. Now let the snake reign. A half-deity out of Capricorn, This rigid Augustus mounts With his sword virginal indeed; and has shorn Summarily the moon-horned river From my bed. May the moon Ruin him with virginity! Drink me, now, whole With coiled Egypt's past; then from my delta Swim like a fish toward Rome.

I’m guessing this isn’t the Mississippi,” I said. “The River of Night,” Bloodstained Blade hummed. “It is every river and no river—the shadow of the Mississippi, the Nile, the Thames. It flows throughout the Duat, with many branches and tributaries.” “Clears that right up,” I muttered.

No matter the border, the Mekong has been an indiscriminate giver and taker of life in Southeast Asia for thousands of years. It’s a paradox like civilization’s other great rivers—be it the Nile, Indus, Euphrates, Ganges or China’s Sorrow the Huang He—for without its waters life is a daily struggle for survival; yet with its waters life is a daily bet that natural disasters and diseases will visit someone else’s village, because it’s not if, but when it’s going to happen that’s the relevant question.

It begins as barely a rivulet, this, the mightiest river in the world, mightier than the Nile and the Ganges, mightier than the Mississippi and all the rivers in China.

Have you not heard of the bar at Shepheard’s? It’s legendary. The best of humanity gathered round to gossip, deal, manipulate, and inebriate

The Nile knew everything,had seen the best and worst if Egypt.

Nevertheless the Yellow River is to China what the Nile is to Egypt – the cradle of its civilisation, where its people learnt to farm, to make paper and gunpowder.

I did love my dresses, but did they have to be so delicate?

What I didn’t understand was what he actually did. Was he a treasure hunter? A student of Egyptian history? A lover of sand and blistering days out in the sun?

Hurt pinched my heart and I tried not to think about how we might have laughed harder if she had behaved more like herself around me.

Khaemwaset’s eyes remained on the riverbank as the green confusion of spring glided by. Beyond the fecund, brilliant life of the bank with its choked river growth, its darting, piping birds, its busy insects and occasionally its sleepy grinning crocodiles, was a wealth of rich black soil in which the fellahin were struggling, knee-deep, to strew the fresh seed.

I won’t let him get away with it. I want him to know it was me that ruined him. The person he underestimated, the sister he believed insignificant and not smart enough to understand his work.

It’s like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo, and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.

If love was a river, then Martha's was the Nile: enormous, life-giving, and at regular intervals capable of drowning you in murk for reasons you didn't understand. But you couldn't do without it. And no one expected you to.

By his account, Faquarl’s first summoning was in Jericho, 3015 BC, approximately five years before my initial appearance in Ur. This “made him, allegedly, the ‘senior’ djinni in our partnership. However, since Faquarl also swore blind he’d invented hieroglyphs by ‘doodling with a stick in the Nile river-mud’ and claimed to have devised the abacus by impaling two dozen imps along the branches of an Asiatic cedar, I regarded all his stories with a certain scepticism.

I call on you, Beloved, merge with me in Love, heal this heart and teach me of all we deem Above I lose the I to find You, to drink from Endless Well, the one that seems so far when all we see is shell Pour this jug and fill it, may it overflow, may it run like river Nile, may it forever grow. Who am I without my Home, without my Source, my Love? A wanderer lost in desert land, a bird, but ... Mourning dove I've traveled long and traveled far, seeking you in skin, when all along you've been right here, calling from within

The bodily ascension of Jesus in Roman Christianity -which has not been granted to David- is a calendrical event which takes place in synchronicity with (i.e. in reference to) the solar culmination on the Summer Solstice when the Sun/Son reaches its highest point in the sky; as the circular zodiac of Dendera reveals to us through its illustrated decanic structure. The Passover on the other hand occurs - as we see on the zodiac and the decanic calendar- during the low tide of the Nile river; which is due around the time of the Winter Solstice.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

He knew more about my parents, truths he wouldn’t share. He drank too much and probably flirted with every woman he met. It was hard to feel special if I was just a drop in the bucket. But he had saved my life. Cared to make sure if I was comfortable. Took my side in arguments with my uncle.

When I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing. Filling pages and people with inspiration. When my thoughts don't want to rest on a page, we argue. We argue that one merely is ready just too comfortable playing in The Nile [denial] river. So we compromise. We grow, water metaphors and plant simile trees of golden-almond manifested love dreams. Then at that moment, we forgot what we were arguing about. Beauty can do that for you. That's the beauty of writing.

At this point...my body's so worn out that the important stuff just kind of washes past me. But I'll tell you what. I'll never look at home the same way again. I'll never look at education the same way again. That's what's been missing here, the whole way, from Kampala to Juba. It's education. How are you supposed to want something if you've never seen it? And we totally take that for granted. I do, anyway. So, yeah, let's give it another day, but not much more than that. 'Cause I'm tired.

He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie's.

In 1498, Vasco da Gama the Portuguese navigator explored this eastern coast of Africa flanking the Indian Ocean. This led him to open a trade route to Asia and occupy Mozambique to the Portuguese colony. In 1840, it came under the control of the Sultan of Zanzibar and became a British protectorate in 1895, with Mombasa as its capital. Nairobi, lying 300 miles to the northwest of Mombasa is the largest city in Kenya. It became the capital in 1907 and is the fastest growing urban area in the Republic having become independent of the United Kingdom on December 12, 1963 and declared a republic the following year on December 12, 1964. Kenya is divided by the 38th meridian of longitude into two very different halves. The eastern half of Kenya slopes towards the coral-backed seashore of the Indian Ocean while the western side rises through a series of hills to the African Shear Zone or Central Rift. West of the Rift, the lowest part of a westward-sloping plateau contains Lake Victoria. This, the largest lake in Africa, receives most of its water from rain, the Kagera River and countless small streams. Its only outlet is the White Nile River which is part of the longest river on Earth. Combined, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, stretches 4,160 miles before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea.

Unlike most mathematical discoveries, however, no one was looking for a theory of groups or even a theory of symmetries when the concept was discovered. Quite the contrary; group theory appeared somewhat serendipitously, out of a millenia-long search for a solution to an algebraic equation. Befitting its description as a concept that crystallized simplicity out of chaos, group theory was itself born out of one of the most tumultuous stories in the history of mathematics. Almost four thousand years of intellectual curiosity and struggle, spiced with intrigue, misery, and persecution, culminated in the creation of the theory in the nineteenth century. This amazing story, chronicled in the next three chapters, began with the dawn of mathematics on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates rivers.

Teacher, where will I come to if I start walking that way?" ... and I pointed. He laughed. "Little man," he said, "that way is North. If you start walking that way and just keep on walking, and your legs don't give in, you will see all of Africa! Yes, Africa, little man! You will see the great rivers of the continent: The Vaal, the Zambezi, the Limpopo, the Congo, and then the mighty Nile. You will see the mountains: the Drakensburg, Kilimanjaro, Kenya, and the Ruwenzori. And you will meet all our brothers: the little Pygmies of the forests, the proud Masai, the Watusi ... tallest of the tall, and the Kikuyu standing on one leg like herons in a pond waiting for a frog. " "Has teacher seen all that?" I asked, "No," he said. "Then how does teacher know it's there?" "Because it is all in the books and I have read the books and if you work hard in school, little man, you can do the same without worrying about your legs giving in.

Seven days west of Katañga flows another Lualaba, the dividing line between Rua and Lunda or Londa; it is very large, and as the Lufira flows into Chibungo, it is probable that the Lualaba West and the Lufira form the Lake. Lualaba West and Lufira rise by fountains south of Katañga, three or four days off. Luambai and Lunga fountains are only about ten miles distant from Lualaba West and Lufira fountains: a mound rises between them, the most remarkable in Africa. Were this spot in Armenia it would serve exactly the description of the garden of Eden in Genesis, with its four rivers, the Gihon, Pison, Hiddekel, and Euphrates; as it is, it possibly gave occasion to the story told to Herodotus by the Secretary of Minerva in the City of Saïs, about two hills with conical tops, Crophi and Mophi. "Midway between them," said he, "are the fountains of the Nile, fountains which it is impossible to fathom: half the water runs northward into Egypt; half to the south towards Ethiopia.

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French, and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971, and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous, and possibly the least-appreciated, people in all the earth. As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtze. Well who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did, that's who. They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges, and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Mississippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan, and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States. When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up, and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. And I was there -- I saw that. When distant cities are hit by earthquake, it is the United States that hurries into help, Managua,

The river’s isolation and secrecy, however, were only part of what made it superlative. There was also its vertical drop. The Colorado’s watershed encompasses a series of high-desert plateaus that stretch across the most austere and hostile quarter of the West, an area encompassing one-twelfth the landmass of the continental United States, whose breadth and average height are surpassed only by the highlands of Tibet. Each winter, storms lumbering across the Great Basin build up a thick snowpack along the crest of the mountains that line the perimeter of this plateau—an immense, sickle-shaped curve of peaks whose summits exceed fourteen thousand feet. As the snowmelt cascades off those summits during the spring and spills toward the Sea of Cortés, the water drops more than two and a half miles. That amounts to eight vertical feet per horizontal mile, an angle that is thirty-two times steeper than that of the Mississippi. The grade is unequaled by any major waterway in the contiguous United States and very few long stretches of river beyond the Himalayas. (The Nile, in contrast, falls only six thousand feet in its entire four-thousand-mile trek to the Mediterranean.) Also unlike the Nile, whose discharge is generated primarily by rain, the engine that drives almost all of this activity is snow. This means that the bulk of the Colorado’s discharge tends to come down in one headlong rush. Throughout the autumn and the winter, the river might trickle through the canyonlands of southern Utah at a mere three thousand cubic feet per second. With the melt-out in late May and early June, however, the river’s flow can undergo spectacular bursts of change. In the space of a week, the level can easily surge to 30,000 cfs, and a few days after that it can once again rocket up, surpassing 100,000 cfs. Few rivers on earth can match such manic swings from benign trickle to insane torrent. But the story doesn’t end there, because these savage transitions are exacerbated by yet another unusual phenomenon, one that is a direct outgrowth of the region’s unusual climate and terrain. On

Show me." He looks at her, his eyes darker than the air. "If you draw me a map I think I'll understand better." "Do you have paper?" She looks over the empty sweep of the car's interior. "I don't have anything to write with." He holds up his hands, side to side as if they were hinged. "That's okay. You can just use my hands." She smiles, a little confused. He leans forward and the streetlight gives him yellow-brown cat eyes. A car rolling down the street toward them fills the interior with light, then an aftermath of prickling black waves. "All right." She takes his hands, runs her finger along one edge. "Is this what you mean? Like, if the ocean was here on the side and these knuckles are mountains and here on the back it's Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West L.A., West Hollywood, and X marks the spot." She traces her fingertips over the backs of his hands, her other hand pressing into the soft pads of his palm. "This is where we are- X." "Right now? In this car?" He leans back; his eyes are black marble, dark lamps. She holds his gaze a moment, hears a rush of pulse in her ears like ocean surf. Her breath goes high and tight and shallow; she hopes he can't see her clearly in the car- her translucent skin so vulnerable to the slightest emotion. He turns her hands over, palms up, and says, "Now you." He draws one finger down one side of her palm and says, "This is the Tigris River Valley. In this section there's the desert, and in this point it's plains. The Euphrates runs along there. This is Baghdad here. And here is Tahrir Square." He touches the center of her palm. "At the foot of the Jumhurriya Bridge. The center of everything. All the main streets run out from this spot. In this direction and that direction, there are wide busy sidewalks and apartments piled up on top of shops, men in business suits, women with strollers, street vendors selling kabobs, eggs, fruit drinks. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. And there's this one street...." He holds her palm cradled in one hand and traces his finger up along the inside of her arm to the inner crease of her elbow, then up to her shoulder. Everywhere he touches her it feels like it must be glowing, as if he were drawing warm butter all over her skin. "It just goes and goes, all the way from Baghdad to Paris." He circles her shoulder. "And here"- he touches the inner crease of her elbow-"is the home of the Nile crocodile with the beautiful speaking voice. And here"- his fingers return to her shoulder, dip along their clavicle-"is the dangerous singing forest." "The dangerous singing forest?" she whispers. He frowns and looks thoughtful. "Or is that in Madagascar?" His hand slips behind her neck and he inches toward her on the seat. "There's a savanna. Chameleons like emeralds and limes and saffron and rubies. Red cinnamon trees filled with lemurs." "I've always wanted to see Madagascar," she murmurs: his breath is on her face. Their foreheads touch. His hand rises to her face and she can feel that he's trembling and she realizes that she's trembling too. "I'll take you," he whispers.

The amazing thing, when she came to do the long-postponed Egypta in 1910, after she had won international fame, was that she did indeed do a work which was not only a day in the life of Egypt but the life of the nation itself, starting with dawn, with prayer, with the river Nile (she was the river itself), with the labors of the working people of Egypt, with temple ceremonies, with entertainment of the pharaoh, and with the final judgment when, before the god Osiris, the heart of Egypt is weighed against the feather of truth.

The idea was that in Palaeolithic days, contemporary with the Glacial Age of Northern Europe and America, the climate of Egypt was entirely different from that of later times and of to-day. Instead of dry desert, the mountain plateaus bordering the Nile valley were supposed to have been then covered with forest, through which flowed countless streams to feed the river below.

prepare for them.12 It was not a spread-eagle speech, but it probably represented in its earnestness and the honesty of its convictions the highest pitch of eloquence Powell was capable of. His heart was still in the irrigation struggle, and the battle could still be won. While he was telling North Dakota what was good for it and urging it to make maximum use of its streams, the North American Review published a Powell article 13 (the source of Senator Stewart’s learning) pointing up the lessons of the Johnstown flood. It said what only an ethnologist might have been expected to know: that agriculture developed first in arid lands, that irrigation agriculture was historically the first agriculture worthy of the name, that on the Indus and the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile, as well as in the American Southwest, stable civilizations had built themselves on the necessity of controlling streams for irrigation. The only truly agricultural American Indians were desert Indians living in areas where agriculture might have been thought impossible. There was the full hope and expectation, therefore, that the American West would become one of the great agricultural regions of the world, but the hope was predicated on wise use of water and control of the rivers. The Johnstown flood, which had told many Americans that it was fatally dangerous to dam

Egypt, the country that boasts the first evidence of FGM some four thousand years ago, today offers the highest incidence of the practice. Egypt is a country of around 90 million people and, according to UNICEF figures in 2013, has the highest number of women who have been mutilated of any country in the world, nearly 30 million, or 91 per cent of the female population.8 This figure is nearer 100 per cent in the villages of the Upper Nile, where the river cuts a deep, wide passage through the desert plateau.

Gideon and Garza had hoped to find passage on a Nile River cruiser to Aswan, but at this late date everything was booked. So they’d done the next best thing and reserved a stateroom with two double beds on a small cruise ship making a circuit of the Red Sea.

shibboleth

How melancholy a thing is success,” he would later write. “Whilst failure inspires a man, attainment reads the sad prosy lesson that all our glories ‘are shadows, not substantial things.

I repeat my motto: poco spero, nulla chiedo.” Little I hope, nothing I ask.

The most important mystery of ancient Egypt was presided over by a priesthood. That mystery concerned the annual inundation of the Nile flood plain. It was this flooding which made Egyptian agriculture, and therefore civilisation, possible. It was the centre of their society in both practical and ritual terms for many centuries; it made ancient Egypt the most stable society the world has ever seen. The Egyptian calendar itself was calculated with reference to the river, and was divided into three seasons, all of them linked to the Nile and the agricultural cycle it determined: Akhet, or the inundation, Peret, the growing season, and Shemu, the harvest. The size of the flood determined the size of the harvest: too little water and there would be famine; too much and there would be catastrophe; just the right amount and the whole country would bloom and prosper. Every detail of Egyptian life was linked to the flood: even the tax system was based on the level of the water, since it was that level which determined how prosperous the farmers were going to be in the subsequent season. The priests performed complicated rituals to divine the nature of that year’s flood and the resulting harvest. The religious elite had at their disposal a rich, emotionally satisfying mythological system; a subtle, complicated language of symbols that drew on that mythology; and a position of unchallenged power at the centre of their extraordinarily stable society, one which remained in an essentially static condition for thousands of years. But the priests were cheating, because they had something else too: they had a nilometer. This was a secret device made to measure and predict the level of flood water. It consisted of a large, permanent measuring station sited on the river, with lines and markers designed to predict the level of the annual flood. The calibrations used the water level to forecast levels of harvest from Hunger up through Suffering through to Happiness, Security and Abundance, to, in a year with too much water, Disaster. Nilometers were a – perhaps the – priestly secret. They were situated in temples where only priests were allowed access; Herodotus, who wrote the first outsider’s account of Egyptian life the fifth century BC, was told of their existence, but wasn’t allowed to see one. As late as 1810, thousands of years after the nilometers had entered use, foreigners were still forbidden access to them. Added to the accurate records of flood patters dating back centuries, the nilometer was an essential tool for control of Egypt. It had to be kept secret by the ruling class and institutions, because it was a central component of their authority. The world is full of priesthoods. The nilometer offers a good paradigm for many kinds of expertise, many varieties of religious and professional mystery. Many of the words for deliberately obfuscating nonsense come from priestly ritual: mumbo jumbo from the Mandinka word maamajomboo, a masked shamanic ceremonial dancer; hocus pocus from hoc est corpus meum in the Latin Mass. On the one hand, the elaborate language and ritual, designed to bamboozle and mystify and intimidate and add value; on the other the calculations that the pros make in private. Practitioners of almost every métier, from plumbers to chefs to nurses to teachers to police, have a gap between the way they talk to each other and they way they talk to their customers or audience. Grayson Perry is very funny on this phenomenon at work in the art world, as he described it in an interview with Brian Eno. ‘As for the language of the art world – “International Art English” – I think obfuscation was part of its purpose, to protect what in fact was probably a fairly simple philosophical point, to keep some sort of mystery around it. There was a fear that if it was made understandable, it wouldn’t seem important.

All my deeds are dark. I am drawn in the river of my sins as deep as the Nile. They say the day of reckoning never turns dark. So it shall be, unless my deeds are brought to light.

onto a bus with an eager group of American and British tourists decked out in plaid shorts and sun hats and made the fourteen-kilometer trip from the hotel, across the Nile River,

The River Between, by James Ngugi (later Ngugi wa Thiongo), redoes Heart of Darkness by inducing life into Conrad’s river on the very first page. ‘The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the very same way, never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.’51 Conrad’s images of river, exploration, and mysterious setting are never far from our awareness as we read, yet they are quite differently weighted, differently—even jarringly—experienced in a deliberately understated, self-consciously unidiomatic and austere language. In Ngugi the white man recedes in importance—he is compressed into a single missionary figure emblematically called Livingstone—although his influence is felt in the divisions that separate the villages, the riverbanks, and the people from one another. In the internal conflict ravaging Waiyaki’s life, Ngugi powerfully conveys the unresolved tensions that will continue well after the novel ends and that the novel makes no effort to contain. A new pattern, suppressed in Heart of Darkness, appears, out of which Ngugi generates a new mythos, whose tenuous course and final obscurity suggest a return to an African Africa. And in Tayb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Conrad’s river is now the Nile, whose waters rejuvenate its peoples, and Conrad’s first-person British narrative style and European protagonists are in a sense reversed, first through the use of Arabic; second in that Salih’s novel concerns the northward voyage of a Sudanese to Europe; and third, because the narrator speaks from a Sudanese village.

It still happened. That feeling of having been dropped a hundred feet at the mention of Mamá and Papá. The feeling that I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs fast enough. It would always feel this way. The pain was a forever fixture in my life.

People died every day. Well-meaning distant relations told me that one day I’d be able to move past it. But I’d traveled thousands of miles only to discover that I couldn’t leave this new weight I carried behind me.

I waited, hoping they’d say more about her. I had many memories I wanted to live again, too. Every crumb felt like a feast to me.

He laughed. “Your curiosity has no sense of decency.” I leaned forward and the corners of his mouth deepened at the invasion of his space. He remained motionless, perfectly at ease to see how far I’d go. “You have no idea, Mr. Hayes.

Mr. Hayes stood close to me, his wavy hair tousled, the color a mix of brown and red, as if unsure of what it wanted to be. Much like the man himself.

Grief was like a memory keeper. It showed me moments I’d forgotten, and I was grateful, even as my stomach hollowed out.

An anomaly, I’m sure,” I said with a little laugh. “As long as we don’t speak about your countrymen, I think we’ll be safe.

Have a care for your reputation,” he said, towering over me. “As if you care about mine,” I snapped. “I’m just a job to you.

Had Mamá thought Tío Ricardo a criminal?

But they died,” I said, and for the first time, my voice didn’t crack. “You’re making the decisions now.

Egypt has been overrun with people who spend most of their lives in grand hotels, visiting many lands but not bothered to learn languages,who have look at everything,but seen nothing.They ruin the planet with their footsteps,and they disrespect Egyptians by taking priceless historical objects and vandalizing monuments.

Traveling alone was an education. I discovered I didn’t like to eat alone, reading on boats made me ill, and I was terrible at cards. But I learned that I had a knack for making friends.

I think my parents went out in that desert, searching for an artifact, a place, or... I don't know. Something," I said, watching him carefully. "My uncle is desperate to find it, too. Do you know what it could be?

But I always managed to break free from the routine in some small way, and Elvira followed. Little adventures with a laughing shadow at my heels.

Whit lifted an indolent shoulder. "In Egypt? We're all looking for something.

The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones,” he quoted.

To grasp the scale of the fraud the seventy Rabbis carried out in their Septuagint translation from Hebrew/Aramaic to Greek we should focus for a while at “ancient Egypt” and its unique landscape in antiquity. For most westerners Egypt is one of the cradles of civilization and it is renowned for many breathtaking monuments like the Pyramids, the sphinx, the temples, the obelisks, and of course the river Nile and its valley. You can’t fail to spot or identify Egypt, nobody can. I mean with all those ancient and enduring landmarks how could we?

Moses and Aaron were directed to visit the riverside next morning, where the king was accustomed to repair. The overflowing of the Nile being the source of food and wealth for all Egypt, the river was worshiped as a god, and the monarch came thither daily to pay his devotions. Here the two brothers again repeated the message to him, and then they stretched out the rod and smote upon the water. The sacred stream ran blood, the fish died, and the river became offensive to the smell. The water in the houses, the supply preserved in cisterns, was likewise changed to blood. But “the magicians of Egypt did so with their enchantments,” and “Pharaoh turned and went into his house, neither did he set his heart to this also.” For seven days the plague continued, but without effect.

Your leadership skill-set might be what we have been waiting for, to bring order and finality to major challenges that affect the global village. The vast hydroelectric generation capacity in Africa, particularly the Great Lakes region and along the Nile River, still remains unutilized potential not benefiting the people of Africa most of whom continue to live in darkness and depleting the forests looking for wood fuel and more fertile farming land.

went by back roads, past pines, swamps, shacks, the small towns of Lorman and Fayette, a school flying a Confederate flag, and down one road on which for some miles there were large lettered signs with intimidating Bible quotations nailed to roadside trees: “Prepare to Meet Thy God—Amos 4:12” and “He who endures to the end shall be saved—Mark 13:13” and “REPENT”—Mark 6:12.” Finally I arrived at the lovely town of Natchez. Natchez is dramatically sited on the bluffs above the wide brown Mississippi, facing the cotton fields in flatter Louisiana and the transpontine town of Vidalia. It was my first glimpse of the river on this trip. Though the Mississippi is not the busy thoroughfare it once was, it is impossible for an American to see this great, muddy, slow-moving stream and not be moved, as an Indian is by the Ganges, a Chinese by the Yangtze, an Egyptian by the Nile, an African by the Zambezi, a New Guinean by the Sepik, a Brazilian by the Amazon, an English person by the Thames, a Quebecois by the St. Lawrence, or any citizen by a stream flowing past his feet. I mention these rivers because I’ve seen them myself, and written about them, but as an alien, a romantic voyeur. A river is history made visible, the lifeblood of a nation.

We were approaching the Sudd. For thousands of years this giant swamp—more than fifty thousand square miles, as big as England—had repelled invaders from the lands to the north. The British explorer Samuel Baker described it as “a vast sea of papyrus ferns and rotting vegetation, and in that fetid heat there is a spawning tropical life that can hardly have altered very much since the beginning of the world.” In 61 AD the Roman emperor Nero, who controlled Egypt, dispatched troops up the river to find the source of the Nile. They returned with reports of “immense marshes” that were too dense for all but the smallest of one-man canoes. It wasn’t until eighteen hundred years later that a Turkish naval captain, operating under orders from the Egyptian ruler Mohammed Ali, was able to penetrate the swamp, reaching as far as Gondokoro. Slaves and ivory were soon flowing north on the Nile. This was the beginning of what Dinka lore calls the time when “the world was spoiled.

OF all the East African natives, the Masai are the most aristocratic and the most feared. They had their origin in the region of the Nile River and before the white man came, were the dominant tribe.

The Hittites were an Indo-European speaking in an ocean of Afro-Asiatic and Semitic groups, their homeland was to the north of Mesopotamia, and it contained no major river like the Nile, Tigris, or Euphrates Rivers. The Hittite empire was also far less enduring than its neighbors, as it only existed from about 1800-1200 BCE

Alchemy, however, began in the first century BC, most probably in Egypt. Indeed, scholars believe that the “chem” in alchemy (and hence in chemistry) is from a Coptic word “khem” which means the Black Land, that is, Egypt, for after the Nile River rises and floods the land each year, it looks black. That alchemy probably began in Egypt makes sense. The Egyptians were some of the best metal workers of the ancient world. From

Approaching it, the one from the south and the other from the north, two great river valleys traverse this desert; in Asia, the Tigro-Euphrates valley; in Africa that of the Nile. It is in these two valleys that the career of man may be traced from the rise of European civilization back to a remoter age than anywhere else on earth; and it is from these two cradles of the human race that the influences which emanated from their highly developed but differing cultures, can now be more and more clearly traced as we discern them converging upon the early civilization of Asia Minor and southern Europe.

Q: What do you call a small river that runs into the Nile? A: Juvenile.

Talvin Singh, Thievery Corporation, A.R. Rahman, AmarBaaba Maal, Asian Dub Foundation, Autechre, Badmarsh and Sri, Bjork, Black Star Liner, The Blue Nile, Boards of Canada, The Chemical Brothers, Dead Can Dance, The Fake Portishead, Future Sound of London, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Goldfrapp, Jamyang, Joi, Jeff Buckley, Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham: original movie soundtrack, Nitin Sawhney, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Rakesh Chaurasia, Sigur Rós, State of Bengal.

As insane as his request sounded to her, the fact that he already saw her nakedness the day before made her calm down a little. “He even covered my nakedness and gifted me with a beautiful dress,” she thought to herself. He held her hand and led her to the Nile river’s shore. He let go and stood back watching her.

I've learned it's always easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.

God as my witness...I'll never make fun of beer muscle again.

Payback's a bitch

They do so have a choice... Of course they have a choice. Bunch of guys could get together and dig up a bunch of dirt and fill that fucking bog. Stone Age tools. You cut that shit down, you get everybody together and you carry dirt from the town and you fill it in. Human beings been doing it for thousands of years. They'd rather come home and fuck off.

Ali had had four wives and sixteen children, not counting the six who died as youngsters. "I'm so sorry," I said, wincing at the magnitude of his loss. "It was a long time ago," he said, puzzled by my concern. "Are you married?" he asked. "How long?" Six years, no children, I told him, adding, "But that will probably change next year." "How do you know?" "What?" "How do you know it will change? It is on God's hands." "Well, some practices will start and others will stop," I said. He gasped. "It's wrong. You are killing the eggs, the sperm." "You know," I said, "the female body ejects its eggs every month." "Yes," he said, gripping the table's edge, "but the sperm! They must move freely. You mustn't hold them back. It's murder!

I actually prefer riding bitch... Less thinking involved. You can actually let your mind wander.