[Sidenote: Influence of nature in Egyptian religion.]
The land of Egypt is, let us remember, a wedge-shaped valley, broad at its northern extremity and gradually narrowing between two ranges of cliffs till it becomes through a great part of its length a mere strip of cultivatable land closely shut in on each side. Its sky overhead is always blue, and from morning till evening intensely bright, flecked only occasionally, and here and there, by thin gauzy clouds, so that the sun’s course, from the first upshooting of his keen arrowy rays over the low eastern hills to his last solemn sinking in a pomp of glorious colour behind the white cliffs in the west, can be traced unimpeded day after day through the entire course of the year. Beyond the cliffs which receive the sun’s first and last greeting stretches a boundless waste--the silent, dead, sunlit desert, which no one had ever traversed, which led no one knew where, from whose dread, devouring space the sun escaped triumphant each morning, and back into which it returned when the valley was left to darkness and night.
The neighbourhood of the desert, and the striking contrast between its lifeless wastes and the richly cultivated plains between the hills, had, as we can see, a great effect on the imaginations of the first inhabitants of the land of Egypt, and gave to many of their thoughts about death and the world beyond the grave an intensity unknown to the dwellers among less monotonous scenery. The contrast was a perpetual parable to them, or rather perhaps a perpetual _memento mori_. The valley between the cliffs presented a vivid picture of active and intense life, every inch of fruitful ground teeming with the results of labour--budding corn, clustering vines, groups of palm-trees, busy sowers and reapers and builders; resounding, too, everywhere with brisk sounds of toil or pleasure. The clink of anvil and hammer, the creaking of water-wheels, the bleating and lowing of flocks and herds, the tramp of the oxen treading out the corn, the songs of women, and the laughter of children playing by the river. On the other side of the cliffs, what a change! There reigned an unbroken solitude and an intense silence, such as is only found in the desert, because it comes from the utter absence of all life, animal or vegetable: no rustle of leaf or bough, no hum of an insect or whirr of a wing, breaks the charmed stillness even for a minute. There is silence, broad, unbroken sunshine, bare cliffs, rivers of golden sand--nothing else. Amenti, the ancient Egyptians called the western desert into which, as it seemed to them, the sun went down to sleep after his day’s work was done; Amenti, the vast, the grand, the unknown; and it was there they built their most splendid places of worship, there that they carried their dead for burial, feeling that it spoke to them of rest, of unchangeableness, of eternity.