as were the works of those industrious people, they
appear to have ignored the first principle of irrigation,
by neglecting to raise the level of the river.
Egypt remains in the same position that nature
originally allotted to her; the life-giving stream that
flows through a thousand miles of burning sands,
suddenly rises in July, and floods thr Delta which it
has formed by a deposit, during perhaps hundreds of
thousands of similar inundation's; and it wastes a
superabundance of fertilizing mud in the waters of the
Mediterranean. As nature has thus formed, and is
still forming a delta, why should not science create
a delta, with the powerful means at our disposal ?
Why should not the mud of the Nile, that now silts
up the Mediterranean, be directed to the barren but
vast area of deserts, that by such a deposit would become
a fertile portion of Egypt ? This work might be
accomplished by simple means : the waters of the Nile,
that now rush impetuously at certain seasons with
overwhelming violence, while at other seasons they are
exhausted, might be so controlled that they should
never be in excess, neither would they be reduced to a
minimum in the dry season ; but the enormous volume
of water heavily charged with soil, that now rushes
uselessly into the sea, might be led throughout the
deserts of Nubia and Libya, to transform them into
cotton fields that would render England independent
of America. There is no fiction in this idea ; it is
merely the simple and commonplace fact, that with a
fall of fifteen hundred feet in a thousand miles, with a
river that supplies an unlimited quantity of water and
mud at a particular season, a supply could be afforded
to a prodigious area, that would be fertilized not only
by irrigation, but by the annual deposit of soil from
the Water, allowed to remain upon the surface. This
suggestion might be carried out by gradations ; the
great work might be commenced by a single dam
above the first cataract at Assouan, at a spot where
the river is walled in by granite hills; at that place,
the water could be raised to an exceedingly high level,
that would command an immense tract of country.
As the system became developed, similar dams might
be constructed at convenient intervals, that would not
only bring into cultivation the neighbouring deserts,
but would facilitate the navigation of the river, that
is now impeded, and frequently closed, by the numerous
eataracts. By raising the level of the Nile sixty
feet at every dam, the cataracts would no longer exist,
as the rocks which at present form the obstructions,
would be buried in the depths of the river. At the
positions of the several dams, sluice gates and canals
would conduct the shipping either up or down the
stream. Were .this principle carried out as far as the
last cataracts, near Khartoum, the Soudan would no
longer remain a desert; the Nile would become not
only the cultivator of those immense tracts that are
now utterly worthless, but it would be the navigable
channel of Egypt for the extraordinary distance of
twenty-seven degrees of latitude—direct from the
Mediterranean to Gondokoro, N. lat. 4° 54'.