CHAP. XVIII.
Inquiry about the Possibility of changing the Course of the Nile—Cause of the Nucta.
It has been thought a problem that merited to be considered, Whether it was possible to turn the current of the Nile into the Red Sea, and thereby to famish Egypt? I think the question should more properly be, Whether the water of the Nile, running into Egypt, could be so diminished, or diverted, that it should never be sufficient to prepare that country for annual cultivation? Now to this it is answered, That there seems to be no doubt but that it is possible, because the Nile, and all the rivers that run into it, and all the rains that swell those rivers, fall in a country fully two miles above the level of the sea; therefore, it cannot be denied, that there is level enough to divert many of the rivers into the Red Sea, the Indian, and Atlantic Oceans, or, perhaps, still easier, by turning the course of the river Abiad till it meets the level of the Niger, or pass through the desert into the Mediterranean.
Lalibala, as we have already seen, attempted the former method with great appearance of success; and this prince, to whom the accidental circumstances of the time had given extraordinary powers, and who was otherwise a man of great capacity and resolution, might, if he had persevered, completed his purpose, the thing being possible, that is, no law of nature against it, and all difficulties are only relative to the powers vested in those who are engaged in the undertaking. Alexander the Great would have succeeded—his father Philip would have miscarried—Lewis the XIV. would perhaps have accomplished it, as easily as he united the two seas by the canal of Languedoc, and with the same engineers; but he is the only European prince of whom this could have been expected with any degree of probability.
Alphonso Albuquerque, viceroy of India, is said to have wrote frequently to the king of Portugal, Don Emanuel, to send him some pioneers from Madeira, people accustomed to level ground, and prepare it for sugar-canes, with whose assistance he was to execute that enterprise of turning the Nile into the Red Sea, and famishing Egypt. His son mentions this very improbable story in his[175] father’s commentaries; and he says further, that he imagines it might have been done, because it was a known fact that the Arabs in Upper Egypt, when in rebellion against the Soldan, used to interrupt the course of the canal between Cosseir on the Red Sea, and Kenna in Egypt.
Tellez and le Grande, mentioning the two opinions of the father and the son upon this subject, give great praise to the son at the expence of the father, but without reason.
In the first place, we have seen that the utmost exertion Don Emanuel could make was to send 400 men to assist the king of Abyssinia, whose country was then almost conquered by the Turks and Moors. It was not then from India we were to expect the execution of so arduous an undertaking. And as to the second, the younger Albuquerque is mistaken egregiously in point of fact, for there never was a canal between Cosseir and Kenna, the goods from the Red Sea were transported by a caravan, and are so yet. We have seen, in the beginning of this work, the account of my travelling thither from Kenna; this intercourse probably was often interrupted by the Arabs in the days he mentions, and so it is still; but it is the caravan, not the canal, that is stopt by the Arabs, for no canal ever existed.
The sum of all this story is, a long and violent persecution followed the conquest of Egypt by the Saracens, who were accustomed to live in tents, which, with their dislike to the Christian churches, made them destroy all the buildings of stone, as also persecute the masons, whom they considered as being employed in the advancement of idolatry: these unhappy workmen, therefore, fled in numbers to Lalibala, an Abyssinian prince of their own religion, who employed them in many stupendous works for diverting the Nile into the Red Sea, or the Indian Ocean, which I have already described, and which exist entire to this day[176].
This idea, indeed, had subsisted as long as the royal family lived in the south part of Abyssinia, in Shoa, in the neighbourhood, and sometimes on the very spot where the attempt was made. When the court, however, removed northward, and the princes, no longer confined in Geshen, (a mountain in Amhara) were imprisoned, as they now are, in Wechné, in Belessen, near Gondar, these transactions of remote times and places were gradually forgot, and often misrepresented; though, so far down as the beginning of this century, we find Tecla Haimanout I.[177] (king of Abyssinia) expostulating by a letter with the basha of Cairo upon the murder of the French envoy M. du Roule, and threatening the Turkish regency, that, it they persisted in such misbehaviour, he would make the Nile the instrument of his vengeance, the keys of which were in his hand, to give them famine or plenty, as they should deserve of him. In my time, no sensible man in Abyssinia believed that such a thing was possible, and few that it had ever been attempted.
As for the opinion of those, that the Nile may be turned into the Red Sea from Nubia or Egypt, it deserves no answer. What could be the motive of such an undertaking? Would the Egyptians suffer such an operation to be carried on in their own country for the sake of starving themselves? and if the country had been taken from them by an enemy, still it could not be the interest of that conqueror to let the inhabitants, now become his subjects, perish, and much less to reduce them to the necessity of so doing by such an undertaking.
Much has been wrote about a miraculous drop, or dew, called Gotta, or Nucta, which falls in Egypt precisely on St John’s day, and is believed to be the peculiar gift of that saint; it stops the plague, causes dough to leaven, or ferment, and announces a speedy and plentiful inundation.