Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Up and down the slippery banks of the Nile goes the centuries-long procession of fellah women bearing head burdens—water-jars or baskets of earth from excavations.

As we neared Cairo and skirted the edge of the desert, away off to the right against the hazy horizon rose three ghost-like cones of gray out of the golden sand. These were the Pyramids, and the steam engine of the twentieth century whistled out a terrible shriek as we came in sight of them. To the left were the Mokattam Hills, with the citadel which Saladin built upon them, while to the right flowed the great broad-bosomed Nile, the mother of the land of Egypt, whose earth-laden waters have been creating soil throughout the ages, and which to-day are still its source of life.

Egypt, in the words of Herodotus, is the gift of the Nile. This whole rainless country was once a bed of sterile sand so bleak and bare that not a blade of grass nor a shrub of cactus would grow upon it. This mighty river, rising in the heights of Africa and cutting its way through rocks and hills, has brought down enough sediment to form the tillable area of Egypt. South of Cairo, for nearly a thousand miles along its banks, there extends a strip of rich black earth which is only from three to nine miles wide. Below the city the land spreads out in a delta shaped somewhat like the segment of a circle, the radii of which jut out from Cairo, while the blue waters of the Mediterranean edge its arc. This narrow strip and fan form the arable land of Egypt. The soil is nowhere more than thirty-five feet deep. It rests on a bed of sand. On each side of it are vast wastes of sand and rock, with not a spot of green to relieve the ceaseless glare of the sun. The green goes close to the edge of the desert, where it stops as abruptly as though it were cut off by a gardener. Nearly everywhere up the Nile from Cairo the strip is so narrow that you can stand at one side of the valley and see clear across it.

Thus, in one sense, Egypt is the leanest country in the world, but it is the fattest in the quality of the food that nature gives it. Through the ages it has had one big meal every year. At the inundation of the Nile, for several months the waters spread over the land and were allowed to stand there until they dropped the rich, black fertilizing sediment brought down from the African mountains. This sediment has produced from two to three crops a year for Egypt through the centuries and for a long time was the sole manure that the land had. The hundreds of thousands of cattle, donkeys, camels, and sheep that feed off the soil give nothing back to it, for their droppings are gathered up by the peasant women and girls, patted into shape, and dried for use as fuel. Until late years the only manure that was used in any part of the country was that of pigeons and chickens, or the crumbled ruins of ancient towns, which, lying through thousands of years, have become rubbish full of fertilizing properties. Recently, as I have said, the use of artificial fertilizers has been encouraged with excellent results.

The irrigation of Egypt is now conducted on scientific lines. The water is not allowed to spread over the country as it was years ago, but the arable area is cut up by canals, and there are immense irrigating works in the delta, to manage which during the inundation hundreds of thousands of men are required. Just at the point of the delta, about twelve miles above Cairo, is a great dam, or barrage, that raises the waters of the Nile into a vast canal from which they flow over the fan-like territory of Lower Egypt. All through Egypt one sees men scooping the water up in baskets from one level to another, and everywhere he finds the buffalo, the camel, or donkey turning the wheels that operate the crude apparatus for getting the water out of the river and onto the land.

But let me put into a nutshell the kernel of information we need to understand this wonderful country. We all know how Egypt lies on the map of northeastern Africa, extending a thousand miles or more southward from the Mediterranean Sea. The total area, including the Nubian Desert, the region between the Nile and the Red Sea, and the Sinai Peninsula, is more than seven times as large as the State of New York, but the real Egypt, that is, the cultivated and settled portion comprising the Nile valley and delta, lacks just four square miles of being as large as our State of Maryland. Of this portion, fully one third is taken up in swamps, lakes, and the surface of the Nile, as well as in canals, roads, and plantations of dates, so that the Egypt of farms that actually supports the people is only about as big as Massachusetts. Though this contains little more than eight thousand square miles, nevertheless its population is nearly one eighth of ours. Crowd every man, woman, and child who lives in the United States into four states the size of Maryland, and you have some idea of the density of the population here. Belgium, that hive of industry, with its mines of iron and coal and its myriad factories, has only about six hundred people per square mile; and China, the leviathan of Asia, has less than two hundred and fifty. Little Egypt is supporting something like one thousand per square mile of its arable area; and nearly all of them are crowded down near the Mediterranean.

Of these people, about nine tenths are Mohammedans, one twelfth Christians, Copts, and others; and less than one half of one per cent. Jews. Among the Christians are many Greeks of the Orthodox Church and Italian Roman Catholics from the countries on the Mediterranean Sea.

Nature has much to do with forming the character and physique of the men who live close to her, and in Egypt the unvarying soil, desert, sky, and river, make the people who have settled in the country become, in the course of a few generations, just like the Egyptians themselves. Scientists say that the Egyptian peasantry of to-day is the same as in the past, and that this is true even of the cattle. Different breeds have been imported from time to time only to change into the Egyptian type, and the cow to-day is the same as that pictured in the hieroglyphics of the tombs made thousands of years ago. The Egyptian cow is like the Jersey in shape and form save that its neck is not quite so delicate and its horns are a trifle shorter. Its colour is a rich red. Its milk is full of oil, and its butter is yellow. It has been asserted that the Jersey cow originally came from Egypt, and was taken to the Island of Jersey by the Phœnicians in some of their voyages ages ago.

But to return to the Nile, the source of existence of this great population. Next to the Mississippi, with the Missouri, it is the longest river of the world. The geographers put its length at from thirty-seven hundred to four thousand miles. It is a hundred miles or so longer than the Amazon, and during the last seventeen hundred miles of its course not a single branch comes in to add to its volume. For most of the way it flows through a desert of rock and sand as dry as the Sahara. In the summer many of the winds that sweep over Cairo are like the blast from a furnace, and in Upper Egypt a dead dog thrown into the fields will turn to dust without an offensive odour. The dry air sucks the moisture out of the carcass so that there is no corruption.

Nearly all of the cultivated lands lie along the Nile banks and depend for their supply of water on the rise of the river, caused by the rains in the region around its sources. When the Nile is in flood the waters are coloured dark brown by the silt brought down from the high lands of Abyssinia. When it is low, as in June, they are green, because of the growth of water plants in the upper parts of the river. At flood time the water is higher than the land and the fields are protected by banks or dikes along the river. If these banks break, the fields are flooded and the crops destroyed.