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?
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