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Withdrawn.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. Were a system of irrigation
established upon the principle that I have proposed, the
advantages would be enormous. The silt deposited in the
Mediterranean, that now chokes the mouths of the Nile, and blocks
up harbours, would be precipitated upon the broad area of
newly-irrigated lands, and by the time that the water arrived at
the sea, it would have been filtered in its passage, and have
become incapable of forming a fresh deposit.
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