Egypt also has had a lot of trouble with the pink boll weevil. This pestiferous cotton worm, which is to be found all along the valley of the Nile, has also done great damage on the plantations of the Sudan, a thousand miles south of Alexandria. It is said that in one year it destroyed more than ten million dollars’ worth of cotton and that hundreds of the smaller farmers were ruined. The government has been doing all it can to wipe out the plague, but is working under great disadvantages. The Egyptian Mohammedans are fatalists, looking upon such things as the boll weevil as a judgment of God and believing they can do nothing to avert the evil. Consequently, the government had to inaugurate a system of forced labour. It made the boys and men of the cotton region turn out by the thousands to kill the worms under the superintendence of officials. The results were excellent, and as those who were forced into the work were well paid the farmers are beginning to appreciate what has been done for them.
The government helps the cotton planters in other ways. Its agricultural department sends out selected seed for planting a few thousand acres to cotton, contracting with each man who takes it that the government will buy his seed at a price above that of the market. The seed coming in from that venture is enough to plant many more thousands of acres, and this is distributed at cost to such of the farmers as want it. More than one quarter of all seed used has latterly been supplied in this way.
The government has also induced the planters to use artificial fertilizers. It began this some years ago, when it was able to distribute thirty thousand dollars’ worth of chemical fertilizer, and the demand so increased that within a few years more than ten times as much was distributed annually.
CHAPTER IV
THROUGH OLD EGYPT TO CAIRO
On my way to Cairo I have taken a run through the delta, crossing Lower Egypt to the Suez Canal and returning through the Land of Goshen.
The soil is as rich and the grass is as green now as it was when Joseph picked out this land as the best in Egypt for his famine-stricken father Jacob. Fat cattle by the hundreds grazed upon the fields, camels with loads of hay weighing about a ton upon their backs staggered along the black roads. Turbaned Egyptians rode donkeys through the fields, and the veiled women of this Moslem land crowded about the train at the villages. On one side a great waste of dazzling yellow sand came close to the edge of the green fields, and we passed grove after grove of date-palm trees holding their heads proudly in the air, and shaking their fan-like leaves to every passing breeze. They seemed to whisper a requiem over the dead past of this oldest of the old lands of the world.
The sakka, or water carrier, fills his pigskin bag at the river, and then peddles it out, with the cry: “O! may God recompense me,” announcing his passage through the streets of village or town.
