FIGURE 14.-DELTA BARRAGE, NEAR CAIRO.

the Assiut barrage was £E3,439,864, and the additional six metres height will cost £500,000, while the work necessary to the antiquities at the island of Phila will cost £1,000,000.

protect

Mr. R. LANG ANDERSON, managing director of the Aboukir Land Company, in the articles he has contributed to the excellent Text Book on Agriculture, issued by the Ministry of Education, says, with regard to the Assuan dam:

"There

summer in

are now 886,900 feddans in Upper Egypt cultivated during sugar cane, cotton, and durah (maize), and when the Nile

Reservoir at Assuan has been heightened the area receiving perennial irrigation will be greatly increased and the basin system will practically disappear. Instead of completely abolishing the basin system it would be more judicious from an agricultural point of view to so divide the basins into two, that summer cultivation could be confined to one half in alternate years, whilst the other half could be flooded, as is now done,

but in

years. In this way all the lands would have a thorough with rich Nile mud every second year, and the noted fertility

alternate

renovation

DRAINAGE.

Where there is irrigation there ought to be an adequate drainage; drainage channels permit the filtering through of fresh water to remove noxious salt, they dry the land and leave it in sounder condition to feed vegetation, and they prevent the subsoil water from being raised too high; in short, a thorough system of drainage would prevent water-logging. As everything tends to point to this water-logging as being the cause of deterioration, the Government will, I feel sure, devote increased attention to the drainage of the country.

In Upper Egypt the drainage has been natural, the water percolating the subsoil and eventually returning back into the Nile. Where the fields are more distant from the river, as in Lower Egypt, a large number of drains have had to be made; these have come into existence only during the last twenty-five years, and are not too numerous. I have seen canals as well as drains, specially the latter, which have been allowed to get overgrown with weeds, and this naturally reduces their efficiency. I was told in the Ministry of Public Works, under which the irrigation department is, that until recently there was not sufficient money at their disposal to keep all the drains clear, but surely the expenditure under this heading must be a remunerative one.

In this connection it will be interesting to consider the following plan, which was drawn for me by Mr. H. C. JEFFRYS, of the Sakha State Domains, and shows the proper method of field irrigation and drainage.

LAND RECLAMATION.

Mr. R. LANG ANDERSON, who was the first to undertake the work of reclaiming land in Egypt, has contributed a detailed article under the heading for the "Text-book of Egyptian Agriculture," (pages 187-211). As the only method of extending the cotton area is by means of land reclamation, I give a few extracts from this interesting article:

"Although Egypt has been cultivated for countless centuries, and one might even record its agricultural history in millenarian periods,

FIGURE 16.

High

Low

Small Permanent Irrigation Canal

100 to 200 m.

Watering:

Permanent Collecting Drain

there yet remains a large area to be reclaimed. The great salt lakes bordering the sea coast, Lakes Mareotis 70,000, Edku 60,000, Borollos 180,000, and Menzaleh 49,000 feddans, with their marginal swamped lands, contain probably 1,000,000 feddans, whilst in almost every province in Egypt there is land which from difficulties of water supply, or drainage, irregularity of surface, supineness or poverty of owners, has never been properly cultivated, or if cultivated in former ages has been allowed to revert. Remains of basin' banks and of ruined towns

NEAR KORASHIA.

(Notice the large amount of weeds.)

indicate more extensive cultivation of the northern delta than actually exists today.

"Reclamation will go on until Egypt reaches its final limits. This extension must cease with reclamation of the seaboard lakes and waste lands of the interior, in all probably not exceeding 1,500,000 feddans, an addition of say 24 per cent. to the present cultivated area. "Reclamation of land necessitates the following operations: First, irrigation; second, drainage; third, levelling; fourth, cropping; fifth, village building. The manner and extent of these various operations depend on the locality and nature of the land taken in hand."

The method of land reclamation adopted by the Aboukir Company, the Sakha Domains Farm, and doubtless at other places, I may describe from what I have seen at Sakha and Aboukir as follows:

The land is levelled by steam levellers (as at Sakha) or by means of a large wooden scoop and boards drawn by horses (see illustration, page 160). Where it is a question of converting a lake into a fruitful plain, the first operation is of course the pumping of the water from the lake. The land is then divided. into small plots, a drainage canal is constructed on three sides and the irrigation canal on the fourth side of the plot. The land is filled up with water daily; some water evaporates, but most of it filters through to the drains. In this way the land is thoroughly washed of the salt; as much as 15 per cent. of salt is sometimes found in the drain water, and even when the Sweetening process has considerably advanced the percentage of salt is as high as 2 to 3 per cent.

The process of washing the soil, in which salt is present in small quantities, is to flood it repeatedly and thus wash it; this method is called "colmatage," but it is said to be inefficient in the case of reclamation of foul soil.

A pumping station to lift the water from the small drains into the Government drain, from where it passes into the Nile, or direct into the sea, must be constructed. At Sakha the pumping station is capable of rising daily, the water covering 4,0005,000 feddans. The engines of this pumping station are Diesel