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In Arabia, not far from Egypt, there is a long and narrow gulf
running inland from the sea called the Erythraean, of which I will
here set down the dimensions. Starting from its innermost recess, and
using a row-boat, you take forty days to reach the open main, while
you may cross the gulf at its widest part in the space of half a day.
In this sea there is an ebb and flow of the tide every day. My
opinion is that Egypt was formerly very much such a gulf as this - one
gulf penetrated from the sea that washes Egypt on the north, and
extended itself towards Ethiopia; another entered from the southern
ocean, and stretched towards Syria; the two gulfs ran into the land
so as almost to meet each other, and left between them only a very
narrow tract of country. Now if the Nile should choose to divert his
waters from their present bed into this Arabian gulf, what is there to
hinder it from being filled up by the stream within, at the utmost,
twenty thousand years? For my part, I think it would be filled in
half the time. How then should not a gulf, even of much greater
size, have been filled up in the ages that passed before I was born,
by a river that is at once so large and so given to working changes?
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