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.

When Napoleon was in Egypt in 1798, his master mind, accustomed to go to the root of many matters in spite of all the alarms and distractions of war, perceived how much might be done by a regulation of the water at the point of the Delta. His idea was to close each branch of the river alternately during the flood, and so double its effect. Mehemet Ali proposed to apply the same principle to low-water, and began to close the head of the Rosetta or left-hand branch of the Nile with an enormous stone dam, so as to divert the whole supply into the Damietta branch. Linant Pasha, then chief of the French engineers, who had been brought over to advise upon the new works, persuaded him to abandon this design, and proposed instead to build a barrage upon each branch, constructing them in the dry, and then diverting the Nile into its new course by means of earthen dams. The Viceroy approved, and at once proposed, with characteristic energy, to dismantle the Pyramids and make use of their material, just as Sultan Hasan had once stripped the marble casing from the Great Pyramid to construct his famous mosque. Fortunately, the prosaic question of transport arrested this design, and new limestone quarries were opened near Cairo instead. But although workshops were built, material collected, and foundations dug, Mehemet seems to have lost all interest in the work, and in 1835 he abandoned it altogether, and for seven years nothing more was heard of it.

Two things appear to have operated in his mind. It seemed simpler to keep on digging out the main canals by the help of the corvée, and cheaper, too, because nothing was wanted but the unpaid labour, though it was false economy. And, secondly, his ill-regulated but far-reaching imagination was already busy upon a new idea, nothing less than the construction of a great reservoir, which should store up the surplus water of the winter and let it out again in the summer, thereby, as he supposed, rendering unnecessary the construction of any minor work like a barrage.

Surely there can be no more curious instance of the irony of fate than the history of these two great ideas—the Barrage and the Reservoir. Both in turn have been carried into successful execution by engineers and statesmen belonging to the very nation which shattered the ambitions of their first authors. Against the crumbling walls of Acre, held so stoutly for weeks by the English sea-captain, when even the notion of a day’s defence seemed a madness, Napoleon’s dreams of Eastern empire dashed themselves vainly to pieces. Forty years later the same walls could not withstand for half a day the guns of their former defenders, and Mehemet Ali in turn saw his own imperial dreams finally dissolve. Mehemet neglected the Barrage, because he thought the Reservoir would make it unnecessary; and yet in the end it was only the successful working of the Barrage which gave new life to the project of the Reservoir, and made its completion an absolute necessity.

The Viceroy, perhaps, deserves little credit for his idea. In matters of irrigation it is often much easier to see what to do than how to do it; like other great men, he imagined better than he knew. Undoubtedly he was fascinated by the fame of King Amenemhat of the Twelfth Dynasty, and his construction of Lake Mœris in the Fayoum. He constructed a new regulator at the spot where the Bahr Yusuf enters that extraordinary province, and even built himself a house there. But whether because of the inherent difficulties of the subject, or because of foreign complications, nothing was done until in 1842 his mind reverted to the idea of the Barrage at the point of the Delta. The Frenchman Mougel had the address to couple his design with a scheme of military fortifications, and, attracted by this double advantage, Mehemet at once ordered the works to be begun, though, unfortunately, his energy was more devoted to making the point of the Delta the military capital of Egypt than towards the regulation of the water. By this time, however, Mehemet Ali’s career was drawing to a close, and in 1848 he died, leaving the work in which he never more than half believed still unfinished.

It is difficult to conceive anything more humiliating and exasperating than the position of the French engineers who acted as advisers to the Egyptian Government. Time has vindicated their reputation, and proved the excellence of their designs and the soundness of their work; but in their own day they had to suffer disappointment, and even disgrace, and to bear the brunt of failure, due not to themselves, but to the conditions under which they lived. With no authority to enforce the execution of their plans, hampered at every turn, sometimes by the incompetence, and always by the unwillingness, of the Arab engineers through whom they had to work, supported only occasionally by the uncertain breeze of viceregal caprice, they struggled bravely on, and deserve the greatest credit for what they did manage to accomplish. In 1853 Abbas Pasha, the then Viceroy, dismissed Mougel from his service, to mark his displeasure at the slowness of the building, and appointed a new man. Little was gained by the change. The Barrages were nominally finished in 1863, and an attempt was made to close the gates on the Rosetta branch. But a settlement took place, and they had to be immediately reopened. Not till 1872 was the Barrage really used, and then only partially on the Rosetta branch, and not at all on the Damietta. Still, whereas before 1872 only 250,000 acres of summer crops had been matured in the Delta, and that at the cost of enormous labour in clearing the canals, afterwards the total was 600,000 acres, and the cost of maintenance was very much less. The ordinary summer supply available for the Delta canals was increased from 64 cubic metres per second to 150.

This success brought home to the mind of the then reigning Khedive, Ismail, the advantages of perennial irrigation and the cultivation of cotton, and he determined to extend the system to Upper Egypt and the Fayoum, where he possessed huge estates, amassed by fair means and foul through the agency of the notorious Mufettish, Said. Accordingly, in 1873 the great Ibrahimiyah Canal was dug. Starting from near Assiout, it runs for 268 kilometres nearly parallel to the Nile on its left bank, and supplies perennial irrigation to 252,000 acres in the provinces of Assiout, Minia, and Beni-Suêf. It also carries flood-water to a series of basins lying to the west of it, nearer the desert. Before 1873 the Bahr Yusuf, which feeds the Fayoum, took its water direct from the Nile, but its head was now transferred to the left bank of the Ibrahimiyah Canal at Dêrut, and 327,000 acres in the Fayoum came nominally under perennial irrigation.

It would perhaps have been more reasonable to perfect the irrigation system of Lower Egypt, and to complete the Barrages entirely, before embarking on new projects in Upper Egypt. But the temptation to improve his own lands by simply calling out the corvée to dig canals was too strong for Ismail; and, indeed, he was not the man to devote himself to the carrying out of old projects to the exclusion of new ones. In him the vigorous and practical originality of his grandfather Mehemet appeared in the form of a fantastic imagination running riot in all directions, unrestrained by the prosaic considerations of time and means. Yet with able Ministers he might have been one of the greatest of rulers. In spite of all the degradation which his reckless extravagance brought on Egypt, the country owes him something; for there was generally something great in his ideas, and time is carrying many of them into effect. It is impossible not to feel some admiration for the man who, when asked what gauge the Soudan railway should be, replied, ‘Make it the same as that of the railways in South Africa. It will save trouble in the end.’