Cairo is the largest city on the African continent, and one of the capitals of the Mohammedan world. Its flat-roofed buildings are a yellowish-white, with the towers and domes of hundreds of mosques rising above them.
Of late Egypt has begun to raise vegetables for Europe. The fast boats from Alexandria to Italy carry green stuff, especially onions, of which the Nile valley is now exporting several million dollars’ worth per annum. Some of these are sent to England, and others to Austria and Germany.
As for tobacco, Egypt is both an exporter and importer. “Egyptian” cigarettes are sold all over the world, but Egypt does not raise the tobacco of which they are made. Its cultivation has been forbidden for many years, and all that is used is imported from Turkey, Greece, and Bosnia. About four fifths of it comes from Turkey.
Everyone in Egypt who can afford it smokes. The men have pipes of various kinds, and of late many cigarettes have been coming into use. A favourite smoke is with a water pipe, the vapour from the burning tobacco being drawn by means of a long tube through a bowl of water upon which the pipe sits, so that it comes cool into the mouth.
The chicken industry of Egypt is worth investigation by our Department of Agriculture. Since the youth of the Pyramids, these people have been famous egg merchants and the helpful hen is still an important part of their stock. She brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, for her eggs form one of the items of national export. During the last twelve months enough Egyptian eggs have been shipped across the Mediterranean to England and other parts of Europe to have given one to every man, woman, and child in the United States. Most of them went to Great Britain.
The Egyptians, moreover, had incubators long before artificial egg hatching was known to the rest of the world. There is a hatchery near the Pyramids where the farmers trade fresh eggs for young chicks at two eggs per chick, and there is another, farther down the Nile valley, which produces a half million little chickens every season. It is estimated that the oven crop of chickens amounts to thirty or forty millions a year, that number of little fowls being sold by the incubator owners when the baby chicks are about able to walk.
Most of our incubators are of metal and many are kept warm by oil lamps. Those used here are one-story buildings made of sun-dried bricks. They contain ovens which are fired during the hatching seasons. The eggs are laid upon cut straw in racks near the oven, and the firing is so carefully done that the temperature is kept just right from week to week. The heat is not gauged by the thermometer, but by the judgment and experience of the man who runs the establishment. A fire is started eight or ten days before the eggs are put in, and from that time on it is not allowed to go out until the hatching season is over. The eggs are turned four times a day while hatching. Such establishments are cheaply built, and so arranged that it costs almost nothing to run them. One that will hatch two hundred thousand chickens a year can be built for less than fifty dollars, while for about a dollar and a half per day an experienced man can be hired to tend the fires, turn the eggs, and sell the chickens.