The notion is that people have failed to detect the massive changes which have happened in the ocean because they have been looking back only a relatively short time into the past.
At the first crow of roosters she wakes up, looks at the dark room, listens to the sound of silence before daybreak, and falls back into a light sleep.
But there've been times in the past when monsoon rains soaked the Empty Quarter and turned it from a desert into grassland that was dotted with lakes and home to various animals.
Calm and peaceful for most of the year, the Nile used to flood annually, thereby creating, irrigating and carrying new topsoil to the nearby farmland, on which ancient Egypt depended for livelihood.