Chapter Eight.
Without doubt the Delta is a splendid region for settlement for any young agriculturist who possesses health, energy, and a natural tendency towards those industrious habits peculiar to the successful men of our country, who have always been willing to metaphorically and really take off their coats and do whatever is necessary by way of example. To succeed in Egypt we must take it for granted that he possesses moderate means, or, say, very moderate means, just sufficient to make a small commencement by hiring; or, far better, by the purchase of land, which can now safely be done with good legal security and at a price that before long will in all probability bound upwards to double or even quadruple its present figure. But the thoroughly good sterling advice of the authority already quoted—advice similar in nature has often been before given to intending settlers in Australia—is that a year at least should first be spent in gaining a knowledge of the country, while learning a sufficiency of the common language to enable a man to direct the labourers who will be under him in their field work. And, what is of equal importance, the intending settler, however great may have been his experience, should be ready to cast aside prejudice in favour of his own preconceived opinions, and studiously take note of why this or that course is followed out by old cultivators; he must learn that amidst a great deal of chaff that he may cast aside there are many grains of good sound wheat—otherwise, excellent dearly bought bits of experience. Festina lente is a grand old Roman proverb, and the newcomer to Egypt will gain in the end by not being in too great a hurry to start.
Unlike the British farmer, the agriculturist in Egypt has at hand an abundant supply of labour. Housed in the mud huts or sun-dried brick houses adjoining the estates, the labourer is at all hours ready to respond to the demand. He receives one or two acres of land let at a reduced rental; he is a day labourer only, and can absent himself at pleasure to attend to his craft. His wage varies from sixpence to tenpence per day of ten hours in summer and eight hours in winter. He provides his own food.
In disposition this peasant is contented, good-natured, not resentful, and of good physique. He is also very untruthful, unreliable at his work, lazy, cunning, and unconscionable as to the quality and quantity of the task he is put to—in short, a thorough eye-servant. He requires constant supervision, when he will do good work under a trying sun. He promises fair, but performs badly. If he commits a fault and is questioned as to how it happened, one can invariably depend upon his telling an untruth. When working on his own plot he is most diligent, but his methods are not always the best, and he does not get the full benefit from the soil, owing to want of intelligence as to the rules of good husbandry. On a large estate, should extra hands be wanted for a special occasion, a hundred to two hundred men can be had on one night’s notice being given—a delightful state of affairs in cases of emergency, though here the farmer does not often suffer from his hay or corn crops being unharvested through the redundance of rain.
A large percentage of the fellaheen are perfectly illiterate, which accounts for their want of readiness to take up the initiative. They have no thirst for knowledge and love in agricultural matters to keep running in the old rut. Exactness, tidiness, and pride in his work are qualities very rarely found in a fellah. Slovenliness in the performance of duties is characteristic of the paid day labourer, and to a lesser degree when working on his own account. In Britain, for instance, where do we find the breeder of stock who excels his neighbours except in the shrewd farmer who, at great trouble and study, and by patient experimenting, attains to success? Not only so, but he is like the leaven which leaveneth the whole lump by raising the standard of a district. The apathy of the fellah is shown in the lack of breeding in horses, cattle, and sheep in Egypt, which is due to want of selecting suitable sires, care in rearing, and the like.
The soil responds to thorough tillage in a marked degree, but too little care is bestowed upon this question of cultivation, as the fellah is prone to scamp his work and leave part of his land solid—that is, not thoroughly stirred. When exposed to the sun the soil cracks and opens into fissures, sometimes as wide as five inches. The fellah is often, too, careless in providing a good bed for the seed, and irregular germination is the result. If the land is judiciously watered and timeously ploughed in a friable condition, it can be brought to a fine tilth without much extra trouble. As it is all soil—nothing in the shape of a bad subsoil exists, as in some parts of Great Britain—deep cultivation is thoroughly beneficial, bringing, as it does, unexhausted soil to the top. Generally in the preparation of the land for the cotton crop, with its deep-searching roots, a depth of twelve inches is attained.
Doubtless much of the apathy of the labouring man amongst the fellaheen is due, as in the case of the rice-feeding Hindoo, to his being to so great an extent a vegetarian. With him the staff of life consists principally of an exceedingly hard kind of bread, baked almost to biscuit, and composed of maize, or dourra, the small-grained millet; and the result of the fellaheen housewife’s efforts in this kind of food preparation necessitates dipping or soaking in water before the bread can be partaken of at a meal.
But in such a splendid garden land as Egypt, where cultivated produce attains maturity at so rapid a rate, and where with careful management and such a spring and summer-like climate two or even three crops of vegetables can be obtained in a year, it may easily be supposed that the peasant can provide himself with a constant supply of green food; and he certainly takes advantage of his position, indulging freely in the ordinary vegetables common in the gardens of the West, and supplementing them with the delicious green maize so popular with the American people.
This latter grain is one of the staple foods, when it has come to maturity, of the inhabitants of the Delta. It is ground into a coarse flour, and mingled with a small proportion of barley; while in addition, to give flavour and a slight stimulus to the digestive organs which are brought to bear upon one of the hardest grains in assimilation, a small portion of the peculiar clover-like, many-seeded plant, fenugreek, is added.
Maize gives place to a great extent in Upper Egypt to millet or dourra amongst the poorer orders; but the better-class work-people, who earn much higher wages than the agricultural labourer, are now taking to the general use of wheaten bread.
Although the ordinary fellah partakes of so simple a diet, and may be wanting in energy, loving as he does to glide through life in the same old groove that was formed by his forefathers, he is a well-built, healthy, muscular individual, and is not to be beaten by any coolie as a worker under a torrid sun. Much of his work consists of raising water for irrigation, and if statistics could be produced as to the number of gallons that he sends trickling amongst the roots of the crop, or moistening the land previously in their preparation, ordinary figures would almost fail. Suffice it to say that it is immense. Even now he clings often of necessity to the old, old shadoof—that which is represented in the engraving—which, in spite of its Egyptian name, is only our old friend of the suburban brickfield, a long pole balanced upon a post in scale beam fashion, with a bucket at one end of the pole, a weight at the other, equal to that of the water which is raised from somewhere below for pouring into a receptacle, ready to be dipped again, perhaps, and sent higher by means of another shadoof farther up.
The worker of this primitive water distributer, in his cotton robe, is one of the commonest objects seen upon the banks. The photograph well depicts the sturdy fellah at his task. In addition, there is the old-world sakieh, a much more complicated affair; for here, in the past, primitive ingenuity turned its hand to mechanical construction, and produced after much toil the manual labour-saving and ox- or buffalo-enlisting water-wheel, working after the fashion of one of our river dredges, but clumsy of the clumsy, and having, in place of the metal scoops, so many earthenware pots, held in their places to the periphery of the water-wheel by as many cords, as will be seen in the engraving. Still, it is effective in its way, and the yoked oxen which supply the motive power that turns the heavy wheels raise vast quantities of water year after year. The sakieh is quaint, old-world, and picturesque, and it has served its purpose so well, for who can say how far back in the past, that it never seems to have occurred to the lower order of Egyptian mind that any improvement could be made. That has been left to the West, and now that under the present progressive forward movement of Egyptian agriculture European, and especially British, water-raising and distributing machines are being utilised, the fate of the sakieh seems to be that sooner or later it will merely live to be spoken of as a curiosity, only seen in some artist’s representation of the past.
The fellah’s habitation has not varied with the years; as in antiquity, so now. The primitive clay hut is simplicity itself. As it is figured in the quaint tomb pictures, so it is to-day in the suburbs and villages—its furniture a wooden chest or two, its cooking utensils a few earthen pots. But his hut is principally his sleeping place, for his life is pretty well passed beneath the broad canopy of heaven. He rises with the dawn to begin his day’s work at the plough, or to handle his heavy hoe. At another time the demands of the crops for water or for the mud-laden fertilising contents of the great stream, take him to the shadoof or to guide the bullock or buffalo turning the water-wheel.
As elsewhere, the fellah’s wife is the soul of his humble home. She toils busily and patiently through the duties of her little domestic centre, cares for her elders, cooks, and finds time to feed the cattle and collect the sun-dried fuel from off the parched soil, to come back marching homeward, strong and statuesque, bearing the piled-up basket upon her head; while it is she who, while her lord is busily lowering and raising the shadoof, descends knee deep into the river or canal to fill the great, heavy, amphora-like earthen pot and then bear it back to her home, classically picturesque in her drapery as she balances the clumsy vessel upon shoulder or head, and bears the life-giving fluid onward with a steady, easy swing. It is she who makes the dourra, or maize bread, and shapes and stitches the cotton clothing, which is the only wear of all her circle. Unlike her sister of the city, she does not shrink so much from the gaze of the other sex, but still to some extent keeps up the tradition; though wearing no veil she will hold up a portion of her drapery at the coming of the passer-by, or perhaps only place her hand before her mouth.
Woman-like, in spite of her menial toil, she believes in personal care, and her long black hair is carefully dressed and glistens with Palma Christi oil. She paints, too, as of old, the marks appearing upon her chin and forehead, while a string of attractive glass beads decorates and hangs suspended from her neck.
The olden Egyptian costume is that principally affected by the fellah. It consists of a closely-fitting cap of felt or cotton and a long robe of the latter material, deeply dyed of an indigo blue. Shirt and drawers are of the same material, while in some cases a young buck amongst his people will adorn himself, like Joseph of old, in a vest of many colours, borrowed from the Arab, the Persian, or the Turk. As above intimated, the fellah believes in a life of leisure, and finds it rather difficult to make the first start at his daily toil.
In the olden days the lot of the fellah was not quite so happy as it might have been. He suffered from enforced labour, and does not seem to have had much chance of appeal. But he had one notable thing in his favour, for a river when in flood is subject to having huge portions of its banks undermined and swept away in a state of muddy solution; and, as was frequently the case, the peasant cultivator, who for the sake of the irrigation had his holding as near the bank as he could contrive to get, was often a great sufferer, being in the possession before the flood of a considerable strip of cultivated land, while after the inundation it was a minus quantity, leaving him to begin life again. Here, however, the law of the land was very equitable upon his behalf, giving him liberty to go either up or down stream to select an equal quantity of the land he had lost that was new and unappropriated, and no one said him nay.
And now, thanks to the just and easy state of the Government, the native working Egyptian is far better off with regard to his condition than he appears to have been at any time in the past. Prosperity surrounds him, and the lesser holders of land, say of from four to ten feddans or acres, rapidly grow well-to-do and distance the larger proprietors. The extent now of the land under cultivation is vastly in excess of what it was. The people are growing more energetic—those of the better class—and are learning fast, while the spirit of emulation is increasing amongst them as they waken up to what modern civilisation will achieve. Their Government, too, is working hard on their behalf, a college having been established at Ghizeh for the purpose of instructing the sons of native landowners and of the working fellaheen class in more advanced agriculture, fitting them in the knowledge necessary for the prosecution of agriculture according to the best forms, the proper rotations of crops, selections of fertilisers, natural and chemical, and, above all, stockbreeding and all that has been learned of late in connection with the dairy.
In brief, much as has been said of the Egypt of the past being the garden of the world, it bids fair to become in the future so great a contrast that old Egypt will pale into insignificance in the bright light of the new.