With a single shadoof water can be lifted 2½ metres; but when the bank is high a second or third tier of shadoofs is employed, and in some places as many as five shadoofs may be seen lifting the water from one level to another, till it reaches the fields. One man working twelve hours a day can lift enough water to irrigate an acre of cotton or corn in ten days.
The sakieh, or Persian water-wheel, consists of a vertical wheel with a string of buckets attached to it, which, as the wheel turns round, are let down into the water, come up full, and discharge their contents into a channel as they come to the top. The wheel is turned by means of spokes, which catch in a horizontal wheel worked by oxen, buffaloes, or some other beast of burden. If the lift is high, the string of buckets may be very long; but if the wheel itself dips into the water, there may be no string at all, and it is then called a taboot. The buckets are often earthenware pitchers, and the wheels themselves are generally of the rudest construction, and made of palm wood; but new and improved iron water-wheels are coming into use. Still, whether of iron or of wood, they all seem to make the same peculiar sing-song whine. There is no sound more characteristic of Egypt. It has a peculiar penetration. Night and day it continues. I believe Egyptian music is founded upon it. The fellaheen say the cattle will not work unless they hear it. Certainly when one stops, the other stops also.
In the Fayoum, where, owing to the difference in the levels, the canals have often a very high velocity, there are very ingenious water-wheels or turbines, which play the part of sakiehs, but are turned by the force of the current; the water thus lifts itself continuously.
Where the lift is very little, shadoofs and sakiehs are replaced by instruments called Natalis and Archimedean screws; but, naturally, since the introduction of perennial irrigation has so increased the area to be watered by lift, machinery has had to be called in, and most of the work is done by pumps worked by steam. Each large land-owner has his own pump and engine, which can be moved from place to place, and are also hired out to the smaller men. On very large estates stationary engines have been erected, which, of course, are able to raise a much larger amount of water; but as a rule the machinery employed is a portable eight-horse-power engine and an eight-inch centrifugal pump.
How different is all this from the lot of the agriculturist in other lands! For him there is no digging or maintenance of canals; no apparatus of regulators, dams, sluice-gates, siphons, and drains; no painful lifting of the water by pumps and engines, shadoofs, and sakiehs. The rain falls upon his fields from heaven without any effort of his. He looks to Providence to regulate his supply; the Egyptian looks to a Government department. But the Egyptian, as a compensation for his extra labour, has the advantage of greater certainty. He knows the sun will shine. The rise and fall of the Nile, variable as it is, can be foretold with greater exactness than that of any other river—with far greater exactness than the duration of the rainy season in any country in the world. Nature indeed made his task simple in the extreme, if he had been content with one crop a year. Every year the flood thoroughly washed the land, and kept it free from injurious salts; it also covered them with a deposit of mud, which relieved him from the necessity of dressing and manuring the exhausted soil. The Nile silt, though singularly rich in potash, the principal food of leguminous plants, like peas, beans, and clover, is, however, very poor in the nitrates on which cereals depend. But the Egyptian clover, called bersine, has the property of secreting nitrates from the air, and depositing them in the soil to an extraordinary extent, so that the land was able to bear crops of clover and cereals in rotation to an unlimited extent without any manuring. The desire to grow rich by crops like cotton and sugar, and by forcing the land to double its output, has changed all this. Not only has the summer supply of water become of the utmost importance, but the soil has to be constantly refreshed with manures. The question of manures is, indeed, only second, under perennial irrigation, to the question of water.
Wherever cattle and stock are numerous, farmyard manure is used, as well as the guano from the immense colonies of pigeons, kept for the purpose in specially built pigeon-lofts throughout Egypt. Between Halfa and Kena there are inexhaustive supplies of nitrates in the desert, and north of Kena the mounds which mark the sites of ancient cities, like Abydos, Ashmunên, Medinet, and the rest, serve the same purpose. The ruins of the past are thus valued by the agriculturist not less than by the archæologist, perhaps even more so; for lands in proximity to them are rented higher in consequence. Year by year more attention is now paid to the dressing of the soil, as perennial irrigation is more understood and more studied; besides the natural resources of the country, an increasing amount of manures is imported from abroad, and there is little doubt that the growing tendency in this direction will continue.
But all preparation of the soil is worse than useless labour unless the necessary amount of water can be provided. This amount varies both with the nature of the crop, the season of the year, and the position of the land. The critical time is, of course, the summer, when the supply of water is least and the heat is greatest, and, of course, in Upper Egypt, where the sun is strongest, and the loss by evaporation consequently greater, the demand is more urgent than in the Delta.
The total amount of cultivable land in Egypt is 6,250,000 acres. Before the completion of the new works, to which period all the figures in this chapter refer, the total nominally under cultivation was about 5,750,000 acres. Of this, Upper Egypt claimed 2,320,000—viz., 587,000 nominally under perennial irrigation, and 1,732,000, including 1,435,000 under basin irrigation every year, and 297,000 of Nile berms, which are only flooded once in six or seven years, and at other times irrigated directly from the Nile by means of shadoofs and water-wheels. Of the whole of this area only about 20 to 30 per cent. produce double crops in the year; for the amount of perennial irrigation is but small, and, although the whole of the Fayoum—329,000 acres—was supposed to be perennially irrigated, so faulty was the water-supply that the summer crops were only about 30 per cent. of the whole, instead of 50 per cent., which is the rule in the Delta. It seems, indeed, as though matters had been arranged expressly for the benefit of the tourist; it is Upper Egypt in the winter season that he goes to see, and it is then that the fields are green with corn, clover, and other crops. The following table shows the different crops, and the acreage devoted to them at the different seasons in Upper Egypt:
| Season. | Acreage. | Crops. |
|---|---|---|
| Summer | 372,500 | Sugar, cotton, vegetables, melons, summer sorghum (or millet). |
| Flood | 530,000 | Flood sorghum, rice. |
| Winter | 2,120,000 | Wheat, beans, clover, barley, lentils, flax (little), onions, vetches. |
In Lower Egypt, or the Delta, the total area of fully or partly cultivated land is 3,430,000 acres, and there are still 500,000 acres of totally unreclaimed land. All this is under perennial irrigation; half of it is under summer crops every year, and 40 per cent. produces two crops a year. The following is a similar table to that given for Upper Egypt: