But there are times when no rain at all will come to help the crops, which, however, seem to suffer very little, from the simple fact that the thorough saturation of the subsoil by the flood, and the constant gentle evaporation going on, make up to a certain extent for the want of genial showers, and the failure seems to be confined to the straw alone, which is shorter than if its growth had been influenced by the dropping clouds.
The floods of European lands are, of course, only occasional, accidents due to a prevalence of storm waters, which the regular rivers and the artificial drainage of the country have not power to carry off; while generally they last but a short time, and instead of being beneficial are destructive. The Nile flow is in every respect the reverse. Instead of being occasional and of short duration, it is a part of Nature’s routine, and perfectly wondrous in its regularity; while in place of being temporary, as in the floods of our own islands, we have here a lasting overflow.
Again, a flood in the British Islands, where the rivers burst their banks and spread over meadow-land and arable fields, leaves the soil soured, sodden, and obnoxious to the plants which are still alive, whole crops and plantations being often swept away, while those that remain are on the high road to perishing from rottenness.
In Egypt the subsoil of sand is ready to absorb, and the ardent sun to rapidly dry, the surface of the mud as soon as the flood sinks, after its stay of months; while the rapidity of growth soon makes up for the, so to speak, dormant state of the cultivated ground that has been flooded, and, as aforesaid, the water departs, leaving its fertilising riches behind. Then, as stated, follows without further tilling the sowing of the crops, which result in abundant growth. This annual regularity is only marred by the extent of the inundation, which is calculated and divided by the Egyptians into high flood, mean flood, and poor flood, according to how far the waters extend when they leave their natural bed.
It is calculated that in the first case, when the Nile has reached its highest point, it has risen to thirty-three feet; in the second case, the mean flood, thirty feet; and in the third, or poor flood, twenty-three feet above its bed. As a matter of course, the higher the flood the wider spread is the inundation, and the deeper the deposit of fertile mud left upon the land when the river has returned to its ordinary limits.
Stay-at-home people are accustomed to look upon Holland as the land of canals, and the face of this carefully cultivated country is monumental as a specimen of a nation’s industry in cutting waterways for the double purpose of draining and traffic, while its drains are as admirable as they are great. Wide tracts of land have been turned from sandy wastes and swamps into fertile meadows and carefully cultivated fields by the Dutch engineers, who have also left traces of their handiwork upon the east coast of England in the drainage of the fens.
But, leaving the supposed canals of the planet Mars to the imaginations of astronomers, it is safe to say that Egypt bears off the palm for works of this description. The ancients knew of their value, and enormous cuts were made by the help of slave labour, and were left to survive the rolling away of centuries, and where not duly cared for, and filled up by the drifting sand, have lain ready to be cleared out, deepened and brought into use again. These have been added to, till at the present time it can be said that the system of canals connected with the main river for the purposes of portage and for perennial irrigation cannot be equalled anywhere in the world.
The barrage of the Delta is of incalculable value, since by closing the sluices the head of water is raised and irrigation made more easy, while the works of this description lately carried out upon the Nile at Assiout and Assouan conserve immense bodies of water, which have formerly flowed regularly down to the sea, carrying with them millions of tons of fertilising mud or warp, with the equatorial washings of the rich, untrodden land. This solution of plant-making soil has gone on downward towards the sea from untold ages, forming by degrees the vast Delta, beside that which was lost to the service of man, merely choking up and making shallow the many watercourses into which the Nile waters have been broken up, and altering the positions of ancient ports and maritime cities now distant from the sea.