Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

In these ways the crop is brought to the railroad stations and to the boats on the canals. The boats go from one little waterway to another until they come into the Mahmudiyeh Canal, and thence to Alexandria. During the harvesting season the railroads are filled with cotton trains. Some of the cotton has been ginned and baled upon the plantations, and the rest is in the seed to be ginned at Alexandria. There are ginning establishments also at the larger cotton markets of the interior. Many of them are run by steam and have as up-to-date machinery as we have. At these gins the seed is carefully saved and shipped to Alexandria by rail or by boat.

The Nile bridge swings back to let through the native boats sailing down to Alexandria with cargoes of cotton and sugar grown on the irrigated lands farther upstream.

A rainless country, Egypt must dip up most of its water from the Nile, usually by the crude methods of thousands of years ago. Here an ox is turning the creaking sakieh, a wheel with jars fastened to its rim.

Egypt is a land that resists change, where even the native ox, despite the frequent importation of foreign breeds, has the same features as are found in the picture writings of ancient times. He is a cousin of the zebu.

The Egyptians put more work on their crop than our Southern farmers do. In the first place, the land has to be ploughed with camels or buffaloes and prepared for the planting. It must be divided into basins, each walled around so that it will hold water, and inside each basin little canals are so arranged that the water will run in and out through every row. The whole field is cut up into these beds, ranging in size from twenty-four to seventy-five feet square.

The cotton plants are from fourteen to twenty inches apart and set in rows thirty-five inches from each other. It takes a little more than a bushel of seed to the acre. The seeds are soaked in water before planting, any which rise to the surface being thrown away. The planting is done by men and boys at a cost of something like a dollar an acre. The seeds soon sprout and the plants appear in ten or twelve days. They are thinned by hand and water is let in upon them, the farmers taking care not to give them too much. The plants are frequently hoed and have water every week or so, almost to the time of picking. The planting is usually done in the month of March, and, as I have said, the first picking begins along in September.

I have been told that cotton, as it is grown here, exhausts the soil and that the people injure the staple and reduce the yield by overcropping. It was formerly planted on the same ground only every third year, the ground being used in the interval for other crops or allowed to lie fallow. At present some of the cotton fields are worked every year and others two years out of three. On most of the farms cotton is planted every other year, whereas the authorities say that in order to have a good yield not more than forty per cent. of a man’s farm should be kept to this crop from year to year. Just as in our Southern states, a year of high cotton prices is likely to lead to overcropping and reduced profits, and vice versa. Another trouble in Egypt, and one which it would seem impossible to get around, is the fact that cotton is practically the only farm crop. This puts the fellaheen more or less at the mercy of fluctuating prices and changing business conditions; so that, like our cotton farmers of the South, they have their lean years and their fat years.