Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

The farms are nothing like those of the United States. We should have to change the look of our landscape to imitate them. There are no fences, no barns, and no haystacks. The country is as bare of such things as an undeveloped prairie. The only boundaries of the estates are little mud walls; and the fields are divided into patches some of which are no bigger than a tablecloth. Each patch has furrows so made that the water from the canals can irrigate every inch.

The whole country is cut up by canals. There are large waterways running along the branches of the Nile, and smaller ones connecting with them, to such an extent that the face of the land is covered with a lacework veil of little streams from which the water can be let in and out. The draining of the farms is quite as important as watering, and the system of irrigation is perfect, inasmuch as it brings the Nile to every part of the country without letting it flood and swamp the lands.

Few people have any idea of the work the Egyptians have to do in irrigating and taking care of their farms. The task of keeping these basins in order is herculean. As the Nile rushes in, the embankments are watched as the Dutch watch the dikes of Holland. They are patrolled by the village headmen and the least break is filled with stalks of millet and earth. The town officials have the right to call out the people to help, and no one refuses. If the Nile gets too high it sometimes overflows into the settlements and the mud huts crumble. During the flood the people go out in boats from village to village. The donkeys, buffaloes, and bullocks live on the dikes, as do also the goats, sheep, and camels.

The people sow their crops as soon as the floods subside. Harvest comes on within a few months, and unless they have some means of irrigation, in addition to the Nile floods, they must wait until the following year before they can plant again. With a dam like the one at Aswan, the water supply can be so regulated that they can grow crops all the year round. This is already the condition in a great part of the delta, and it is planned to make the same true of the farms of Upper Egypt.

As for methods of raising the water from the river and canals and from one level to another, they vary from the most modern of steam pumps and windmills to the clumsy sakieh and shadoof, which are as old as Egypt itself. All the large land owners are now using steam pumps. There are many estates, owned by syndicates, which are irrigated by this means, and there are men who are buying portable engines and pumps and hiring them out to the smaller farmers in much the same way that threshing machines are rented in the United States and Canada. Quite a number of American windmills are already installed. Indeed, it seems to me almost the whole pumping of the Nile valley might be done by the wind. The breezes from the desert as strong as those from the sea sweep across the valley with such regularity that wind pumps could be relied upon to do efficient work.

At present, however, water is raised in Egypt mostly by its cheap man power or by animals. Millions of gallons are lifted by the shadoof. This is a long pole balanced on a support. From one end of the pole hangs a bucket, and from the other a heavy weight of clay or stone, about equal to the weight of the bucket when it is full of water. A man pulls the bucket down into the water, and by the help of the weight on the other end, raises it and empties it into a canal higher up. He does this all day long for a few cents, and it is estimated that he can in ten days lift enough water to irrigate an acre of corn or cotton. At this rate there is no doubt it could be done much cheaper by pumps.

Another rude irrigation machine found throughout the Nile valley from Alexandria to Khartum is the sakieh, which is operated by a blindfolded bullock, buffalo, donkey, or camel. It consists of a vertical wheel with a string of buckets attached to its rim. As the wheel turns round in the water the buckets dip and fill, and as it comes up they discharge their contents into a canal. This vertical wheel is moved by another wheel set horizontally, the two running in cogs, and the latter being turned by some beast of burden. There is usually a boy, a girl, or an old man, who sits on the shaft and drives the animal round.

The screech of these sakiehs is loud in the land and almost breaks the ear drums of the tourists who come near them. I remember a remark that one of the Justices of our Supreme Court made while we were stopping together at a hotel at Aswan with one of these water-wheels in plain sight and hearing. He declared he should like to give an appropriation to Egypt large enough to enable the people to oil every sakieh up and down the Nile valley. I doubt, however, whether the fellaheen would use the oil, if they had it, for they say that the blindfolded cattle will not turn the wheel when the noise stops.

I also saw half-naked men scooping up the water in baskets and pouring it into the little ditches, into which the fields are cut up. Sometimes men will spend not only days, but months on end in this most primitive method of irrigation.