APPENDIX B. Vol. I., p. 145. EGYPTIAN IRRIGATION. UPPER EGYPT is still mainly irrigated upon the ancient system of canals and reservoirs or basins, described in the text; its principles are well understood by the native cultivators, who all turn out willingly to work night and day, to guard against any danger of a breach in the walls during high flood, or to raise the walls sufficiently to secure the necessary reserve, when the Nile is abnormally low. When fairly worked, the traditional method confers the utmost benefit on the soil with the minimum of human labour; and the explanations given by modern engineers of the modus operandi of old Father Nile, in the execution of his purpose to provide corn in Egypt, rather heighten than diminish our estimate of his beneficent wisdom. There are three elements in the Nile water which contribute to make its deposits into a manure of ideal completeness. The Blue Nile brings a volcanic detritus from the Abyssinian highlands in great quantity; the Sambat, the waters of which are a milky white, contributes lime; while the great swamp regions of the White Nile add the organic matter required. Lake Victoria itself, the first chief reservoir in the chain, is about 1,120 metres above the sea level; rain is almost perpetual in the surrounding hills, but a natural barrage to regulate the downflow is provided by the Sadds or dams of living vegetation which stretch from Gondokoro to the mouth of the Bahr el Gazel. The water above the Sambat is always green and unwholesome; and for two or three weeks between the 10th of June and the 10th of July, when the green water from the sadds reaches Cairo, the water of the river is undrinkable. Then the red muddy water, charged with alluvium, from the Blue Nile and the Atbara begins to arrive; but the danger of laying profane hands upon the ordinances of the River god. became strangely apparent between 1870 and 1880, when passages in the swamp were kept open for navigation and the consequent loss of the natural barrage resulted in alternations of the highest and the lowest floods ever recorded. The volume of the Nile at Khartoum and Cairo is about the same, so that the Atbara and the springs in the valley together must inake up for the waste of water by evaporation and irrigation. Before swelling the flood the Blue Nile has to saturate its own sandy bed and the desert. It takes the flood thirteen days to come from Khartoum to Assouan, and six from Assouan to Cairo; telegraphic communication respecting the state of the river at Khartoum is an indispensable condition to a thoroughly satisfactory regulation of the water supply, and consequently of the agriculture of the country. High Nile in Lower Egypt is delayed about a month by the filling the basins of Upper Egypt, where, if the canals are in order, it is scarcely possible for the river to rise too much, though if the Nile stays high too long, the crops suffer from worms and heat before harvest. The filling of the basins begins ordinarily on the 12th of August, and ends in the south by October 1, the water reaching the Nile by October 15. North of the newly restored and completed barrages, the latter date is postponed to the middle and end of November. If the flood is low, the water is, where possible, drawn from the upper basins to the lower ones to complete their supply; and an insufficient total water supply is economised and made to serve the needs of a wider area by means of temporary banks, erected so as to hold the water back at different levels, just long enough to fill the canals without waste, as shown in the diagram. Half the water, it is evident, suffices to water the valley, by the help of the banks, b, b, b. Nile b b desert desert Irrigated in this way, the soil of Egypt produces one rich crop year after year, and the fellahin are almost at leisure, except during seed-time and harvest, or during alarms of excessive or deficient flood, so that they are at liberty to add to their slender resources by earning the wages paid, since the abolition of the corvée, for the necessary work in keeping the canals clear. This unproductive work is lessened when sluices on a large enough scale are provided to let the water on the lands where it is wanted, without standing in the canals. And Upper Egypt seems at present to require nothing more for its agricultural welfare than the provision of additional reservoirs, that will allow the area of cultivated land to increase, and solid works for the regulation of the high flood water; with, it should perhaps be added, a clear apprehension on the part of all officials of the end in view, so that large canals should in no case be substituted for small ones, till machinery had been provided which could be depended on to work them as efficiently, in proportion, as the simple system to be superseded. The story of the failure of Mehemet Ali's experiments in scientific irrigation might pass for an allegory on the dangers of a little knowledge, especially when applied as a substitute for the traditional wisdom of ancient custom and experience. The persons concerned in the working of a machine,—whether it be an irrigation canal or the government of a country,—if left absolutely to themselves, to consult their own convenience as best they can, without the intrusion of external force or fallacy, will in time hit upon a method of keeping the wheels revolving; and this method will work, as it is said, by rule of thumb, even if the formula of its working remains unconstructed. But unless all possible disturbing forces have been calculated and allowed for a priori, it is perfectly certain that new methods intended to introduce an improvement at one point will disturb some portions of the old mechanism, so as to induce new, and, as it were, artificial evils, which again, dealt with individually, will introduce further complications, and in practice, further dislocation of the original mechanism. This is not an argument against elaborate machinery, but an argument for instruction as complete and intelligence as cultivated as the machinery is complex. And this is what her manifold controllers have not succeeded in bestowing upon the sacred land of Nile. Down to 1820, Lower Egypt was irrigated by a partial system of basins for the low land, while cotton or maize were grown during flood upon the highlands, drenched by the high floods occurring five or six times in a century. Mehemet Ali cut a number of deep summer canals to discharge the low level summer supply of the Nile so as to enable summer crops of cotton to be obtained. The summer or sefi canals run twenty feet below the general level of the country, and water has to be pumped from them, so that the labour of cultivation is increased, and artificial manure is required besides, the result being a general average of two crops a year. The time when the flood water can be supplied is an important element in the culture of different crops, and one motive for over-deep cuttings was that the old shallow canals did not get it early enough for maize cultivation. Mehemet strengthened the dykes which kept back the flood and allowed the basin walls to fall into decay, so that vast tracts got only water, without the fertilizing mud, at the very time when the soil was being exhausted by additional cropping; while the dams built to hold back the water during flood to the level of the country "converted the canals into a series of pools which formed very efficient silt traps," that had to be cleared at an enormous expense of forced labour. Nor was this all the damage done: notwithstanding the regulators, the canals were so much too large during flood that the water sent down by them drowned all the natural and artificial drainage outlets, reducing some land to swamp and some to salt wastes. Ten thousand acres of the best land in Egypt have been ruined in the last twenty years by salting. Ismail's most practical work—the Ibrahima canal—damaged a large neighbouring tract by depriving it of the "red water" of the natural flood, while the money spent on it would have provided masonry regulators to all the basins of Upper Egypt. It is calculated that the crops in Lower Egypt are one-third more valuable than those of the upper country, but at 1 W. Willcocks, Egyptian Irrigation (1889), p. 96. present neither the peasantry nor the treasury reap a reward proportionate to the cost and labour imposed by these first ill-advised innovations. The English engineers, who form the only really popular element in the English occupation, have to wrestle with the double problem, of reclaiming the land lost by faulty methods of irrigation, and extending the benefits of the old and sound methods as widely as possible, as well as to meet the continued demand for a system of summer canal irrigation which shall not inflict permanent injury on the soil. By summer irrigation seventy to eighty inches of water may be brought, in about twenty waterings in the course of a year, to stand upon the soil; this sinks over half a yard below the surface and evaporates; and as the Nile water is rich in salts, these accumulate on the surface, unless crops are chosen to counteract the excess. The land can also be preserved by winter washings if properly drained, but drainage cuts are useless if above the level of the country, and the carrying capacity of different subsoils has also to be tested in order to calculate the drainage requirements. If regulators are provided, the same canal can be used alternately to irrigate and drain, but then it has to be large enough to give a double quantity of water in a fixed time. The commonest method is to wash by cultivating summer rice, which reclaims salt land; but mud cannot come on till the salt has been washed off bad land, and accordingly it must be a work of time to recover for use the large tracts of low-lying lands in the Delta, at one time famous for their fertility. Some of these surround the large salt lakes by the coast, which formerly had more or larger openings that kept the water in them at the level of the Mediterranean, and are swept during the winter by salt water; others are reclaimable swamp, and the rest is simply land destroyed by bad systems of cultivation. Cuts for drainage and navigation, with embankments where necessary, will remedy the first evil. For swamps, drainage cuts, pumping stations, and rice cultivation are prescribed; while the best. way to reclaim deteriorating land is held to be to revert, every fourth or fifth year, to the primitive system of basin irrigation, or else drain for summer rice or wash for winter clover. Clover irrigated from winter canals can be cut five times a year instead of three, and some estimate of the possible fertility of the soil can be gathered from the fact that good land on the Mahmoudia canal bank lets at £12 an acre! Really well-planned irrigation works nearly pay their expenses out of the profits of a single year; thus, the reparation and completion of the barrages cost about half a million, and diminished at once the cost of clearing silt from the canals of the whole Delta by over £300,000. These famous and often-mentioned works were designed by Mougel, a French engineer, and begun in 1842, and consist of a vast barrier, below Cairo just above the forking of the Damietta and Rosetta branches of the Nile. They were completed in their present form in 1891, thirty years after their first abandonment; and a head of four metres of water was at once secured. The achievement was pleasantly and appropriately celebrated, on the appeal of Sir Colin Scott Moncrieff, by the bestowal of a pension on Mougel, who was still living, and had been in no way to blame for the scamped materials and work which rendered his design almost useless for so many years. In general the record of the deeds of the foreigners in Egypt, and their relations alike to the Egyptians and to each other, is such that we have reason to be glad of the innumerable reasons which exclude all mention of them from these pages. But there is one other incident, also connected with the regulation of the waters, which is pretty enough, and Egyptian enough, to deserve to be recorded on the walls of an "eternal dwelling-place" when the hero of it rests in the fields of the Amenti with the souls of the true and just, who, in the valley of the Nile, “have not shown to the people the face of a crocodile." An important district was threatened with a year's destitution by a low Nile; the people, in their distress, applied to a canal inspector, who hastened to the spot, and working night and day, erected a temporary barrage, damming up a canal so as to raise the water to the needful level and save the crops. The relief was so great that a solemn service of thanksgiving was held, in the chief mosque of the province, by the highest available dignitary of the national church. And popular enthusiasm went so far that, not only was the infidelity of the engineer, who had wrought the deliverance, forgotten and condoned, but his presence at the service in the mosque was invited and insisted on.1 The return from any judicious expenditure on reservoirs and regulators is so speedy, certain, and ample that some well-wishers to the Egyptians join the chorus of speculators who would like to "develop" Egypt as an investment for foreign capital. Foreigners of every nationality and every creed have indulged for so many millenniums in the lucrative sport of spoiling the Egyptians, that it might seem a hopeless task to persuade an industrial age to renew its faith in the wisdom of the victims. And yet, if we apply the most modern standards of economic merit, what more can be demanded of an agricultural country than to export food, and maintain a large operative population in content? And when, between Amenhotep and Moncrieff, has Egypt come nearer to fulfilling this ideal, than when she followed the ancient lights of her own wisdom under her own Pharaohs? By the help of sun and river, Egyptian industry and Frankish engineering science may bring from the black soil even richer, more abundant and precious crops than were won in ancient Egypt; but unless the teachings of history are wasted—as it were a sin they should be, in the land which has done more than any other to teach the rest of the world to write and read its history-these fruits of labour and industry will not be squandered in subsidies to ignorant and irresponsible Compagnies anonymes, but will serve a wise and independent government to minister to the welfare of its people. Egypt does not need to borrow now except from her own taxpayers, upon whom her taxes should be spent-a renewal of ancient custom which, in a few years, could not but lead to the astounding and paradoxical 1 England in Egypt, Alfred Milner (1892), p. 303. |