With the Pyramids of Giza rising ghostly and majestic beyond a flooded palm grove, this vivid hand-colored card by the celebrated Cairo firm of Lehnert & Landrock captures the annual Nile inundation — a phenomenon that shaped Egyptian civilization for 5,000 years and was permanently ended by the Aswan High Dam in 1970, making this image both beautiful and historically irreplaceable. A flat-bottomed felucca ferries a group of figures — women in dark robes, children — through the shimmering flood, while white egrets drift across the submerged shoreline and a solitary white-robed figure stands on a sandy islet in the middle distance. Lehnert & Landrock, founded in Cairo by Rudolf Lehnert and Ernst Landrock, produced some of the finest hand-colored photographic postcards of North Africa and the Middle East from the 1910s through the 1940s, and their cards are among the most collected of the genre.