Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462, page 9 by Various Authors
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orders of a narrow piece of land given to them by the Nile. The villages of Rasras and Fares, above the pass on the western bank, and of El-Hamam below, as well as the more extensive and better-favoured establishment of Silwa, with its little plain, are all peopled by men of the same race. With the exception of El-Hamam, which has a territory only a few feet wide, the cultivable land belonging to each village seems adequate to its support. They have a few small groves of palms; had just harvested some fair-sized dhourra-fields when we were last there; and had some fields of the castor-oil plant. Perhaps cultivation might be extended; a good deal of ground that seemed fitted for spade or plough was overrun with a useless but beautiful shrub called the silk-tree. Its pod, which, when just ripe, has a blush that might rival that on the cheek of a maiden, was beginning to wither and shrivel in the sun, and opening to scatter flakes of a silky substance finer than the thistle's beard, leaving bare the myriad seeds arranged something like a pine-cone.
I have called the plant useless, because vain have been the attempts made to apply its produce to manufacturing purposes; but Arab mothers procure from the stem a poisonous milky substance, with which they sometimes blind their infants, to save them in after-life from the conscription. How strangely love is corrupted in its manifestations by the influence of tyranny! I have seen youths who have exhibited a foot or a hand totally disabled and shrivelled up, and who boasted that their mothers, in passionate tenderness and solicitude for them, had thrust their young limbs into the fire, that they might retain their presence through war, though maimed and rendered almost incapable of work.
Few plants or trees of any value grow here spontaneously. The pretty shrub called el-egl droops beneath the rocks of Silsilis over the water, accompanied sometimes by a dwarf willow; and the sandy earth, washed down the gullies on the western bank in winter, produces a plent