Such estates as the above do not often come into the market, however. Most of Egypt is in small farms, and little of it is owned by foreigners. Six sevenths of the farms belong to the Egyptians, and there are more than a million native land owners. Over one million acres are in tracts of from five to twenty acres each. Many are even less than an acre in size. The number of proprietors is increasing every year and the fellaheen, or fellahs, are eager to possess land of their own. It used to be that the Khedive had enormous estates, but when the British Government took possession some of the khedivial acres came to it. These large holdings have been divided and have been sold to the fellaheen on long-time and easy payments. Many who then bought these lands have paid for them out of their crops and are now rich. As it is to-day there are but a few thousand foreigners who own real estate in the valley of the Nile.
The farmers who live here in the delta have one of the garden spots of the globe to cultivate. The Nile is building up more rich soil every year, and the land, if carefully handled, needs but little fertilization. It is yielding two or three crops every twelve months and is seldom idle. Under the old system of basin irrigation the fields lay fallow during the hot months of the summer, but the canals and dams that have now been constructed enable much of the country to have water all the year round, so that as soon as one crop is harvested another is planted.
The primitive norag is still seen in Egypt threshing the grain and cutting up the straw for fodder. It moves on small iron wheels or thin circular plates and is drawn in a circle over the wheat or barley.
The Egyptian agricultural year has three seasons. Cereal crops are sown in November and harvested in May; the summer crops are cotton, sugar, and rice; the fall crops, sown in July, are corn, millet, and vegetables.
The mud of the annual inundations is no longer sufficient fertilizer for the Nile farm. The fellaheen often use pigeon manure on their lands and there are hundreds of pigeon towers above the peasants’ mud huts.
The whole of the delta is one big farm dotted with farm villages and little farm cities. There are mud towns everywhere, and there are half-a-dozen big agricultural centres outside the cities of Alexandria and Cairo. Take, for instance, Tanta, where I am at this writing. It is a good-sized city and is supported by the farmers. It is a cotton market and it has a great fair, now and then, to which the people come from all over Egypt to buy and sell. A little to the east of it is Zagazig, which is nearly as large, while farther north, upon the east branch of the Nile, is Mansura, another cotton market, with a rich farming district about it. Damietta and Rosetta, at the two mouths of the Nile, and Damanhur, which lies west of the Rosetta branch of the Nile, not far from Lake Edku, are also big places. There are a number of towns ranging in population from five to ten thousand.