With All The Talent And Industry
Of The Native Egyptians, Who Must Naturally Depend Upon The
Waters Of The Nile For Their Existence, It Is Extraordinary That
For Thousands Of Years They Have Adhered To Their Original Simple
Form Of Mechanical Irrigation, Without Improvement.
If any one will take the trouble to watch the action of the
sageer or water-wheel, it must strike him as a most puny effort
to obtain a great result, that would at once suggest an extension
of the principle.
The sageer is merely a wheel of about twenty
feet diameter, which is furnished with numerous earthenware jars
upon its exterior circumference, that upon revolving perform the
action of a dredger, but draw to the surface water instead of
mud. The wheel, being turned by oxen, delivers the water into a
trough which passes into a reservoir, roughly fashioned with
clay, from which, small channels of about ten inches in width
radiate through the plantation. The fields, divided into squares
like a chess-board, are thus irrigated by a succession of minute
aqueducts. The root of this principle is the reservoir. A certain
steady volume of water is required, from which the arteries shall
flow throughout a large area of dry ground; thus, the reservoir
insures a regular supply to each separate channel.
In any civilized country, the existence of which depended upon
the artificial supply of water in the absence of rain, the first
engineering principle would suggest a saving of labour in
irrigation: that, instead of raising the water in small
quantities into reservoirs, the river should raise its own waters
to the required level.
Having visited every tributary of the Nile during the
explorations of nearly five years, I have been struck with the
extraordinary fact that, although an enormous amount of wealth is
conveyed to Egypt by the annual inundations of the river, the
force of the stream is entirely uncontrolled. From time
immemorial, the rise of the Nile has been watched with intense
interest at the usual season, but no attempt has been made to
insure a supply of water to Egypt during all seasons.
The mystery of the Nile has been dispelled; we have proved that
the equatorial lakes supply the main stream, but that the
inundations are caused by the sudden rush of waters from the
torrents of Abyssinia in July, August, and September; and that
the soil washed down by the floods of the Atbara is at the
present moment silting up the mouths of the Nile, and thus
slowly, but steadily, forming a delta beneath the waters of the
Mediterranean, on the same principle that created the fertile
Delta of Egypt. Both the water and the mud of the Nile have
duties to perform,--the water to irrigate; the deposit to
fertilize; but these duties are not regularly performed:
sometimes the rush of the inundation is overwhelming, at others
it is insufficient; while at all times an immense proportion of
the fertilizing mud is not only wasted by a deposit beneath the
sea, but navigation is impeded by the silt. The Nile is a
powerful horse without harness, but, with a bridle in its mouth,
the fertility of Egypt might be increased to a vast extent.
As the supply of water raised by the sageer is received in a
reservoir, from which the irrigating channels radiate through the
plantations, so should great reservoirs be formed throughout the
varying levels of Egypt, from Khartoum to the Mediterranean,
comprising a distance of sixteen degrees of latitude, with a fall
of fifteen hundred feet. The advantage of this great difference
in altitude between the Nile in latitude 15 degrees 30 minutes
and the sea, would enable any amount of irrigation, by the
establishment of a series of dams or weirs across the Nile, that
would raise its level to the required degree, at certain points,
from which the water would be led by canals into natural
depressions; these would form reservoirs, from which the water
might be led upon a vast scale, in a similar manner to the
insignificant mud basins that at the present day form the
reservoirs for the feeble water-wheels. The increase of the
river's level would depend upon the height of the dams; but, as
stone is plentiful throughout the Nile, the engineering
difficulties would be trifling.
Mehemet Ali Pasha acknowledged the principle, by the erection of
the barrage between Cairo and Alexandria, which, by simply
raising the level of the river, enabled the people to extend
their channels for irrigation; but this was the crude idea, that
has not been carried out upon a scale commensurate with the
requirements of Egypt. The ancient Egyptians made use of the lake
Mareotis as a reservoir for the Nile waters for the irrigation of
a large extent of Lower Egypt, by taking advantage of a high Nile
to secure a supply for the remainder of the year; but, great as
were the works of those industrious people, they appear to have
ignored the first principle of irrigation, by neglecting to raise
the level of the river.
Egypt remains in the same position that Nature originally
allotted to her; the life-giving stream that flows through a
thousand miles of burning sands suddenly rises in July, and
floods the Delta which it has formed by a deposit, during perhaps
hundreds of thousands of inundations; and it wastes a
superabundance of fertilizing mud in the waters of the
Mediterranean. As Nature has thus formed, and is still forming a
delta, why should not Science create a delta, with the powerful
means at our disposal? Why should not the mud of the Nile that
now silts up the Mediterranean be directed to the barren but vast
area of deserts, that by such a deposit would become a fertile
portion of Egypt? This work might be accomplished by simple
means: the waters of the Nile, that now rush impetuously at
certain seasons with overwhelming violence, while at other
seasons they are exhausted, might be so controlled that they
should never be in excess, neither would they be reduced to a
minimum in the dry season; but the enormous volume of water
heavily charged with soil, that now rushes uselessly into the
sea, might be led throughout the deserts of Nubia and Libya, to
transform them into cotton fields that would render England
independent of America.
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