The Ismailia Canal supplies water to the Koubbeh and Mostorod estates, and in this neighbourhood is a good deal of very valuable agricultural land, some portions of which are let to the fellaheen for three months in a year, so as to enable them to grow a crop of maize.
Hereabouts, tethered in the clover fields, a herd of the Khedive’s camels are pastured, many of these being bred for carrying purposes, others (the slighter of build) for riding and speed. The scene is attractive from its verdure, but comparatively treeless, though it is worthy of mention that two solitary weeping willows do their best to adorn the landscape—a plain with the suggestions of home in the shape of lapwings, or birds bearing a very strong resemblance, which fly up here and there.
This estate is close to Heliopolis—the ancient On—where almost the only suggestions of the City of the Sun are the sunshine and a great square piece of white stone, bearing hieroglyphs, and in perfect preservation, while in the distance stands up in solitary state the far-famed Obelisk.
Chapter Three.
“Words, words, words!” quoth Hamlet, and the reader of this sketch of the possibilities in the way of cultivation offered by the Khedive’s dominions may be disposed to contemptuously say the same. But in the following pages it is proposed to give proof of what may be done in an ordinary way by one who is gardener for pleasure and health, supplier of ordinary produce to the market, or farmer upon a larger scale, without looking for a moment upon the vast increase that is bound to follow the wider and wider distribution of that life of such a land—abundant water, not merely for irrigation, but in this case charged year by year with the rich fertilising mud of the vast equatorial regions regularly borne down by the Nile in flood.
Among the first questions an intending settler might ask respecting the country that he intends to make his temporary or future home would naturally be, “What is the place like? What sort of seasons are they?”
Egypt is a country which may be said to be blessed with four seasons. There is that which begins in July with the inundation of the Nile, when for about two months the whole country of the Delta may be likened to a vast lake dotted with islands represented by the towns and villages. Naturally, then, the air is moist, and mornings and evenings have their mists. In the second season, answering to our winter and early spring, we have cold nights; but the days are hot, and the vegetation is rapid and luxuriant. The third, corresponding to our spring, is the least attractive; while the fourth, which continues until the rising of the Nile, is in the highest degree delightful.