Under the Pharaohs and under the Romans the whole of Lower as well as Upper Egypt was under basin irrigation, and the whole country was cultivated. In those days Egypt was the granary of the Mediterranean, and at the time of the Arab conquest, A.D. 700, her population was estimated to number 12,000,000. Under Arab rule began that period of deterioration which lasted for 1,100 years, and which, had the system of irrigation been less natural to the physical conditions of the country and less simple, would have resulted in an absolute abandonment of cultivation, and reduced Egypt to the state in which Mesopotamia, once the garden of the world, finds itself to-day. Even as it was, by A.D. 1800 the population was brought down to about 2,000,000, and all the northernmost and greater half of the Delta had become a neglected and uncultivated swamp. War, famine, and pestilence, in turn, had played their part; but the fundamental cause of all was the misgovernment, which had neglected the irrigation. For in basin irrigation, as, indeed, with all irrigation, two things are of the utmost importance: the first, to get the water on to the land; and the second, to drain it off again. Salt is the great enemy to be fought. Not only do the Nile waters contain a large quantity of salts, in solution, but the strata underlying the alluvial deposits, being of marine origin, are also rich in salts. If the water is allowed to stand on the land, evaporation takes place, until nothing but a salt efflorescence is left. While if the land be so water-logged that the level at which water can be obtained by digging is brought near to the surface, the water containing salts from below is drawn upwards by means of capillary attraction, and once more evaporation takes place, leaving the salts in the soil. It is clear that as the natural level of the land approaches sea-level it becomes more and more troublesome to provide proper means of carrying off the water. Accordingly, the northernmost parts of the Delta were the first to suffer, and gradually the line of cultivation receded.
Nor was this all. No one looking at a map of the Delta can fail to have been struck by that extraordinary feature of the northern coast-line, the great lakes. At the present time there are in the Delta about 3,430,000 acres of land cultivated or under reclamation, and another 500,000 acres of waste land. North of these lie 1,180,000 acres, either permanently covered by the lakes or else flooded by them from September to December. Between the lakes and the sea is a belt of sand-dunes or sandy plains, pierced occasionally by openings. The sand-dunes are constantly being augmented by the prevailing north-west winds. These lakes or lagoons are for the most part extremely salt, and are distributed as follows, beginning from the west: Lake Mareotis, 70,000 acres; Edku, 60,000 acres; Borillos, 180,000 acres, and as much more during flood and early winter; and Lake Menzalah on the east, largest of all, 490,000 acres, and flooding 200,000 acres more at the same time of year. All these waste lands, now known as the Berea, were cultivated in Roman times, some being occupied by vineyards, others by wheat, and it would seem that the lakes were kept from extending landwards by dykes. But when the land was allowed to go out of cultivation no one had any interest in looking after the regulation of the lakes. First, the passage through the sand-dunes became silted up, because, as the basins decreased in number, less water was drained from them into the lakes at the time of the inundation. Then, after the closing of the openings, the water gradually rose, breached the neglected dykes, and completed the ruin of the land. Once the openings in the dunes are closed, the lake has to rise to a considerable height before it can force its way through again, owing to the continuous action of the sand driven by the wind. In this way it came to pass that neither of the lakes had more than one opening into the sea, and consequently, rising in flood-time above sea-level, invaded the lands to the south.
Another cause may have possibly contributed to the same effect—namely, a sinking of the coast lands. Nowhere is this a more probable explanation of the facts than in the neighbourhood of Lake Manzalah. Before the Arab conquest much of what is now a shallow lake was famous for its gardens, palm-groves, vineyards, and wheat-fields; besides its agricultural villages, it contained towns famous for their cloth and cutlery manufactures, like Tunah, Damirah, Dabik, and, above all, Tinnis. But at the time of the conquest these towns were already islands in the lake, a position which enabled them to be the last stronghold of Coptic resistance to the Moslems.
Whatever the cause or the combination of causes—and the history of these tracts remains very obscure—the results were the retreat southwards of the cultivated area, with the consequence that, after over 1,000 years of Mohammedan rule, Egypt found herself in the weakened and impoverished condition already described; saved only from annihilation by the system of basin irrigation, of which the traditions survived, though in a diminished area, stubbornly preserved from age to age by her industrious and conservative peasantry.
CHAPTER III
PERENNIAL IRRIGATION
It was the Viceroy Mehemet Ali who revolutionized the methods of Egyptian agriculture, and introduced what is known as perennial irrigation—that is to say, irrigation all the year round, as opposed to irrigation during the flood only. In all the annals of the East there are few more striking figures and few histories more exciting than that of the Albanian tobacco-seller, who, rising high in the favour of Sultan Mahmoud, was sent to Egypt as Viceroy in 1810. Adopting a method well known in Cairo, and well calculated to secure the respect, and even the affection, of Orientals, he consolidated his power by the treacherous murder of the Mamelukes, and thoroughly organized the military resources of his province. Summoned to the aid of the Sultan, his armies bloodily stamped out the successful rising of the Greeks in the Peloponnese, and left to himself he would have settled the question of Greek independence once for all. But his summary proposal to transport the whole Christian population, and repeople the Morea with Mohammedan plantations, provoked the intervention of the Powers, and at Navarino he suffered the complete loss of his fleet. Undismayed, he conceived the idea of making himself master of the Turkish Empire. His armies overran Syria, and easily overcoming the Turkish opposition, he threatened Constantinople itself. Once more, if left to himself, he would have succeeded in his object, but once more the slow processes of European diplomacy at last resulted in action. British guns gave the death-blow to his hopes at Acre, and Turkey was saved from her ambitious vassal, though Egypt remained a practically independent State, and her sovereignty became the hereditary appanage of the house of Mehemet.
In the region of domestic policy this strange combination of barbarism and genius proved that he retained the commercial instincts of the tobacco-seller as well as the far-reaching ideas and the drastic methods of the despot. He perceived the advantages which would accrue from the cultivation of cotton and the sugar-cane, hitherto unknown in Egypt. These crops are impossible under a system of basin irrigation; for though they require to be watered all through the summer, they would be ruined by complete inundation, and the shallow flood canals are well above the summer level of the river. But difficulties were nothing to Mehemet Ali. The corvée was called out, and the unfortunate fellaheen were set to work to dig new canals and reconstruct the existing water-ways in the Delta, so as to render them capable of conveying water during the period of low Nile. At the same time the dykes along the banks of the Nile and the canals were very much strengthened, so as to keep out the flood; the old basin dykes were obliterated, and arrangements made for irrigating the land from the new canals.
Of course, perennial irrigation in itself had always existed in Egypt. It would have been indeed strange if the principle applied by anybody who daily waters a window-box had not occurred to the Egyptians. The Nile berms were often enclosed to protect them from inundation, and watered directly from the river all the year round, while within the basins themselves considerable tracts were irrigated from wells. But never before had special canals been provided by Government for perennial irrigation. The advantages of perennial irrigation are that crops like cotton and sugar can be grown, which would otherwise be impossible, and that two, or even three crops, can be produced in a year, instead of only one. The land is therefore increased in value, but, on the other hand, there are serious objections. First of all, the land is deprived of the full benefit derived from the annual renewal of the soil by the silt deposit. Agriculture becomes a much more intricate and difficult process; the exhausted soil has to be constantly refreshed and stimulated by dressings and manures. The basin irrigator makes less profits, but he has less risk and less anxiety; he can only ride a donkey, while the perennial irrigator can ride a horse. But behind the horseman sits black Care. A low summer supply means to him the waste of many weeks’ labour and much expenditure in preparing and sowing his fields; the basin irrigator does nothing till the flood is over, and should the inundation not cover a part of his land, it merely means that that part lies fallow for another year, and suffers no deterioration. A breach in the dykes during the flood is inconvenient to the one, no doubt, but fatal to the other, for it means the ruin of his growing cotton or sugar. And under perennial irrigation it is much more likely to occur, for the basins act as a safety-valve in the inundation, and, while they lengthen out the period of the flood in Lower Egypt, enormously decrease its volume at any given time; but when the same lands are receiving only an occasional watering, the volume that rushes to the sea is by so much the greater, and the pressure on the dykes is heavily increased.
If Mehemet Ali had been content to preserve the old basin dykes, the vivifying effects of the flood-water might have been occasionally applied, and some of these dangers averted. But, as we have seen, everything had to give way to the immediate cultivation of cotton, and the dykes were levelled. Nor was this the only error committed. The new canals were faulty in slope and alignment. Too often their subsidiaries were constructed merely with the object of carrying water to the lands of powerful and favoured individuals, without regard to the general interest. It was found in consequence that an enormous silting up of the canals took place every year. But the Viceroy, with all the forced labour of Egypt at his free disposal, took little heed of this, and vast numbers of men were dragged from their homes every year to redig the canals. Even so it was impossible for the task to be completed before the next flood came round. The lower reaches of the canals remained choked with mud and weeds, and, worst of all, proper drainage was neglected.