The Nile gives her all that makes her valuable.

This broad, ample, and unfailing stream not only by its annual inundation enriches the soil and prepares it for tillage in a manner that renders only the lightest further labor necessary, but serves as a reservoir from which inexhaustible supplies of the precious fluid can be obtained throughout the whole of the year.
The water, which rises towards the end of June, begins to subside early in October, and for half the year--from December till June--Egypt is only cultivable through irrigation.

She produces, however, during this period, excellent crops--even at the present day, when there are few canals--from the facility with which water is obtained, by means of a very simple engine, out of the channel of the Nile.

This unfailing supply enabled the cultivator to obtain a second, a third, and even sometimes a fourth crop from the same land within the space of a year.
The course of the Nile from Elephantine, where it entered Egypt, to Cercasorus, near Heliopolis, where it bifurcated, was in general north, with, however, a certain tendency westward.

It entered Egypt nearly in long.