The European Merchant Is Rarely
Seen, And Trade Resolves Itself Into Robbery And Piracy Upon The
White Nile, And Other
Countries, where distance and difficulty of
access have excluded all laws and political surveillance.
Nevertheless, throughout that desert, and neglected
Wilderness,
the Nile has flowed for ages, and the people upon its banks are
as wild and uncivilized at the present day as they were when the
Pyramids were raised in Lower Egypt. The Nile is a blessing only
half appreciated; the time will arrive when people will look in
amazement upon a mighty Egypt, whose waving crops shall extend,
far beyond the horizon, upon those sandy and thirsty deserts
where only the camel can contend with exhausted nature. Men will
look down from some lofty point upon a network of canals and
reservoirs, spreading throughout a land teeming with fertility,
and wonder how it was that, for so many ages, the majesty of the
Nile had been concealed. Not only the sources of that wonderful
river had been a mystery from the earliest history of the world,
but the resources and the power of the mighty Nile are still
mysterious and misunderstood.
In all rainless countries, artificial irrigation is the first law
of nature, it is self-preservation; but, even in countries where
the rainfall can be depended upon with tolerable certainty,
irrigation should never be neglected; one dry season in a
tropical country may produce a famine, the results of which may
be terrible, as instanced lately by the unfortunate calamity in
Orissa. The remains of the beautiful system of artificial
irrigation that was employed by the ancients in Ceylon, attest
the degree of civilization to which they had attained; in that
island the waters of various rivers were conducted into valleys
that were converted into lakes, by dams of solid masonry that
closed the extremity, from which the water was conducted by
artificial channels throughout the land. In those days, Ceylon
was the most fertile country of the East; her power equalled her
prosperity; vast cities teeming with a dense population stood
upon the borders of the great reservoirs, and the people revelled
in wealth and plenty. The dams were destroyed in civil warfare;
the wonderful works of irrigation shared in the destruction; the
country dried up; famine swallowed up the population; and the
grandeur and prosperity of that extraordinary country collapsed
and withered in the scorching sun, when the supply of water was
withdrawn.
At the present moment, ten thousand square miles lie desolate in
thorny jungles, where formerly a sea of waving rice-crops floated
on the surface; the people are dead, the glory is departed. This
glory had been the fruit of irrigation. All this prosperity might
be restored: but in Egypt there has been no annihilation of a
people, and the Nile invites a renewal of the system formerly
adopted in Ceylon; there is an industrious population crowded
upon a limited space of fertile soil, and yearning for an
increase of surface. At the commencement of this work, we saw the
Egyptians boating the earth from the crumbling ruins, and
transporting it with arduous labour to spread upon the barren
sandbanks of the Nile, left by the retreating river; they were
striving for every foot of land thus offered by the exhausted
waters, and turning into gardens what in other countries would
have been unworthy of cultivation.
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