Chapter IV: The Culture of the Fields

It has already been explained that on the Nile berms or high banks, which are covered by the flood only once in six or seven years, on islands in the river, and on selected tracts within the basins in the neighbourhood of wells, it has been the immemorial custom to lift water on to the fields. Everywhere the two primitive instruments of ancient Egypt are in common use to-day—the shadoof and the sakieh. The shadoof is a long pole balanced on a support. From one end of it is suspended a bucket, and from the other a heavy counterpoise, equal in weight to the bucket when full of water. The bucket is made of various materials, very often leather, though the ordinary kerosene-oil tin of commerce is making its presence felt here as elsewhere. The shadoof is worked by hand. The bucket is pulled down into the water, then lifted up by the help of the counterpoise, and its contents are tipped over into the channel leading to the cultivated land, where the water is steered by means of miniature canals and dams into the required direction. I suppose there could not be a simpler form of unskilled labour than working the shadoof. Whenever I think of the fellah of Upper Egypt, I think of the shadoof. Up and down, creak and splash, hour after hour, day after day, he goes on lifting and tilting, with an amazing and monotonous regularity. Nothing disturbs him—not even a steamer grounded on a sand-bank twenty yards in front of him. As he stands, naked except for a loin-cloth of blue cotton, with his absolutely dull, impassive features, his magnificent chest and arms but weak legs, you cannot help wondering which came first, the shadoof or the shadoof-man, so perfectly are they adapted to each other. Two piastres are the humble guerdon of the long day’s labour. You can calculate upon the fellah as you could on a machine. But, in spite of it all, deep down in his soul lies the sentiment which redeems him and distinguishes him from a mere machine—his absorbing love for the soil. Take him away, set him to other tasks—to serve, for instance, in the army—he will perform his duties with the same unfaltering regularity and docility; but all the time he is thinking in his heart of the black soil and the water of Egypt. In Omdurman I asked a more than usually intelligent Egyptian soldier, who had been told off to perform some small services for me, ‘Do you like being in the army?’ Without hesitation came the answer, ‘No.’ ‘What do you want to do?’ ‘I wish to be at home,’ he said, ‘and cultivate the ground.’

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:

LOWER EGYPT.

_Season._ _Acreage._ _Crops._

Summer 1,674,000 Cotton, sugar, vegetables, rice.

Flood 980,000 Maize (nearly all), rice.

Winter 2,139,000 Wheat, barley, clover, beans, vegetables,
flax.

Even if we look only to the summer acreage under crops, it is obvious that the water-supply in the summer is very important; but when we look to the value of the crop it becomes much more striking. Far the most valuable crop in Egypt is the cotton, which is the principal item in the summer. In Upper Egypt the value of a summer crop is, on the average, more than twice that of a winter crop per acre, and in the Delta the proportion is nearly the same. And though the value of the flood crops is increased by the date-palms, of which there are 5,700,000 paying taxes in Egypt, and whose produce is gathered at this season, it cannot be compared with the summer crops. Sugar-cane is now but little grown in the Delta, and even in Upper Egypt its acreage is rather less than that of cotton.

Valuable as are the cotton-plant and the sugar-cane, it must never be forgotten that one of the humbler winter crops, though valued much lower in point of money, is yet the foundation of well-being in the others—I mean the Egyptian clover, or bersine, the friend of beast and man alike. Long before I knew its remarkable properties, I admired it for its beauty. Green and glossy, it covers acre upon acre with a luxuriant carpet, in pleasing contrast both to the black soil and the desert sand, and most refreshing and comforting to the eye. A bundle of it will satisfy even the grumbling camel; even the melancholy buffalo looks a shade less depressed when her turn comes to be tethered in it for her meal. Sheep and donkeys can hardly eat it down fast enough within the circle of their ropes before it has grown up again. And all the time it is steadily collecting in the soil the invaluable globules of nitrate, which will put new life into the succeeding cotton or corn. The part it plays in preparing the soil can be estimated by the rotations of crops followed by the Egyptian cultivator. These are as follows:

ON RICH SOILS.

_Winter._ _Summer or Flood._

First year Clover Cotton.

Second year Beans or wheat Indian corn.

ON POOR SOILS.

_Winter._ _Summer or Flood._

First year Clover Cotton.

Second year Clover Cotton.

Third year Barley Rice or fallow.

Rice and barley have their place, because they are less affected by the injurious salts, which are the great enemies of the soil’s fertility.

In Lower Egypt cotton is sown from the end of February to the beginning of April. The land is well watered before it is ploughed for the seed, and again when the seed is sown. From then until the beginning of the flood it is watered on the average about once in twenty days. The harvest lasts from August 20 to November 10, and the cotton is picked two or three times over. During this time the crop is watered about once in every fifteen days, but as the water is now abundant there is nothing to fear. Indian corn is sown from July 5 to August 30, and October 15 to November 30 is the period of harvest. It is irrigated at the time of sowing, twenty days after, and then once in ten or twelve days. The first two of these waterings are, of course, the important ones. The earlier it is sown, the better the crop will be, because it will have better weather for maturing; but if the flood is late, and consequently the water-supply is low, the Government may have to resort to a system of rotations in sending water down the canals, and then the Indian corn crop may be sacrificed to the interests of the cotton. Rice is the wettest of all the crops; the kind (called ‘sultâni’) sown in May and reaped in November is watered once in ten days before the flood, but during the flood is given as much water as the drains can carry off. The other kind (called ‘sabaini’) is sown in August, and also reaped in November. Both in Lower and Upper Egypt it is purely a flood crop, and takes all the water it can get. The winter crops, wheat, beans, barley, and clover, are sown in November and December. Wheat and beans are irrigated twice, barley once, but clover goes on growing up till June, and takes more water according to the number of crops, sometimes three or four, that are taken off it.

In Upper Egypt cotton-sowing begins at the same time, but the harvest is earlier. Sugar-cane is sown in March, and the canes are cut from December 15 to March 15. Sometimes the same roots are left in the ground, and produce another crop in the second year; but this is never of such quality as the first, and the land has probably to be left fallow after it. Sugar, therefore, though nominally more valuable than cotton per acre, is more costly in the long-run. It is watered every twelve or fifteen days. The other crops are the summer and flood sorghum, grown on the berms or in tracts within the basins, and irrigated by shadoofs and water-wheels about once every ten days; and the wheat, beans, clover, and barley, in the basins. The cereals are usually not watered at all, but the clover follows the same course as in Lower Egypt.

Summing up these results, we find that the principal crops in Lower Egypt are cotton and rice. The cotton needs irrigation about once in twenty days, the rice once in ten days. To provide this amount of water, a canal should discharge (after allowance has been made for wastage) 22 cubic metres in twenty-four hours per acre of cotton, and 40 cubic metres per acre of rice. That is to say, 1 cubic metre per second will suffice for 4,000 acres of cotton and 2,150 acres of rice. In Upper Egypt rice is only a flood crop, and cotton and sugar need about 25 to 30 per cent. more water than in the Delta, owing to the greater loss from evaporation—that is to say, 1 cubic metre per second will only suffice for 3,000 acres of cotton or sugar. During the winter the land throughout Egypt requires on the average a watering once in forty days. But, as we have seen, it is the summer supply for the cotton that is the really important thing. We shall see later what the effect of the reservoir is likely to be in safeguarding and extending these interests.