Amelia Edwards

"Eager for conquest, and tempted by the rich pearls and tin mines for which the island was famous, but pretending only to punish the poor savages for having helped the Gauls, with whom he was at war, Julius Caesar came over from Italy with his ships and soldiers, plundered and killed in every direction round about , and made the first conquest of Britain. This happened just fifty-five years before Christ. Scarcely a hundred more had gone by when the came with fifty thousand men, and subdued it over again ( 43). It was during the reign of this emperor that , a patriot Briton, made the first effort to free his country from the Roman yoke. After nine years conflict he was taken prisoner ; but was afterwards released by the clemency of Claudius."

"Till the publication of 's Guide to the Eastern Alps in 1868, and the appearance of Messrs. Gilbert and Churchill's joint volume in 1864,—the was scarcely known even by name to any but scientific travellers. A few geologists found their way now and then to ; a few artists, attracted in the first instance to as the birthplace of , carried their sketch-books up the ; but there it ended."

"}} has put Egypt in an epigram. " A donkey-ride and a boating-trip interspersed with ruins " does, in fact, sum up in a single line the whole experience of the Nile traveller. Àpropops of these three things—the donkey, the boat, and the ruins—it may be said that a good and a comfortable Dahabeeyah add very considerably to the pleasure of the journey; and that the more one knows about the past history of the country, the more one enjoys the ruins."

"Our knowledge of how men lived and thought in the Valley of the Nile five or six thousand years before the Christian era is ever on the increase. It keeps pace with the march of , and that march extends every year over a wider area. Each season beholds the exploration of new sites, and each explorer has some new thing to tell."