THE VALUE OF THE NILE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VI, Issue 488, 3 August 1912, Page 7

THE VALUE OF THE NILE.

In a Government report upon the Egyptian Budget for 1909 it is stated ;luit "The essence of Egypt's prosperity is the water of the Nile." This, of course, is no more than Dfiicial rscognition of what has be:ome almost a trueism. The Nile las made Egypt from. time immem>rial ; it is only recently that Egypt greatly to her benefit, has taken to •c-making the Nile. The Egyptian Icllah suffers as much from land lunger as he ever did, but he has no c.nger to depend solely upon the Lrength of his own right arm in orIcr to rescue his strip of ground from dlic grip of the desert. It must be remembered that in Egypt sewing :omes before ploughing or digging. The fellah scatters the seed on the moist brown mud left by the receding Nile after the flood season ; he breaks up that mud when it has jaked into chocolate-like lumps, and iepends for his harvest -upon the' ivater which can afterwards be applied to the soil thus curiously tilled. Under the old system the water, when available, was painfully hoisted from the Nile of its offshoots by neans of the shaduf, a clumsy lever ,vith a bucket at one end, or by the ;akiyeh, a pot-hung waterwheel worked by cow power. But these primi;ive appliances are becoming things of the past, at least in Lower Sgypi. What the fellah has to do iow is to pay his water tax —a very moderate impost—and, in return, Sovernment brings Nile water within 2a sy reach of his land by means of irrigation canals and pipes. He may still have to hoist it here and there, iut much labour is saved, and, besides that, land which was formerly Loo remote from the river to be of Falue is now brought under cultivation. Not only so, but whereas formerly the fructifying flood came and ivent at its own sweet will, it is now caught behind barrages, and supplied to the fields as these require its moisture.

The creation of great artificial akes behind these "barrages on the Nile has been a triumph o'f engineering and the salvation of Egypt. It s no easy matter to bridle one of the largest rivers in the world whe« in flood, and the dams at Assouan, Assiout., and Esneh —the last completed last year—have involved some extraordinary operations. Thus, at Ssneh, the river channel was first curtailed to 740 feet, then to 450 feet, and the latter gap was gradually closed by throwing into it millions of sacks full of earth and sand until the current, its fury growing a s its width lessened, was captured behind the concrete ramparts, to be doled 3ut, as required, through regulating locks, to thirsty lands lower down the stream. This Esneh barrage alone has brought 240,000 acres under ;ultivation, and it has been reckoned that it repays its cost, which was necessarily large, every year. Of ;ourse, only a comparatively small proportion of this increment goos into the Government coffers.

If the Nile belonged solely to Egypt, this system of irrigation by •jarrage might be continued until the intire Nile Valley, from Khartum to Hairo, was covered with fruitful : arms. But other people have claitns upon the water of the river, and some of these have awakened to the fact that they and their forefathers have allowed what was literally a stream of wealth to roll unheeded past them. Near Khartum, as most people remember, the Nile forks into two branches, the White Nile and the Blue Nile. The former stretches through the Southern Sudan and the Equatorial Provinces to the Great Lakes of Africa. The Blue Nile extends into Abyssinian territory, as does also the Atbara, the great tributary which joins the main Nile some distance below Khartum. The White Nile nowadays is under British influence from source to sea ; from Uganda to Alexandria. In some ways that circumstance simplifies irrigation problems associated with, the river ; in the Lower Nile Valley it rather complicates them, because British justice will not allow the Equatorial Provinces an:l the Sudan to be deprived of water .n order that Lower Egypt may profit. In the meantime the "sudd," or weed, which choked the stream above Khartum, has been cleared away, and the loss of water by subsidence into the immense marshes there has been greatly reduced. But the main result of this has been to send more water down to be stored behind the Assouan and other barrages ; the process has not benefited the Sudan except to the extent to which it has opened the river channel to navigation. If the Sudan is to be developed it must have barrages also, and if water is stored behind them then, at least when the floods are short, there may not be sufficient to supply the needs of Lower Egypt. It is a vary large and very nice question as to how much water each region can fairly claim, and ultimately it may become necessary to appoint a board whose business it will be to assign the Kilo floods each season according to the needs and rights of the various provinces.

The Blue Nile and the Atbara are in a different position, because their upper waters are beyond British control. The late Emperor of Abyssinia showed no disposition .to interfere with the flow of the streams, but neither would he permit them to be regulated in the interests of Egypt. Some years ago there was a project, under Government auspices, to utilise Lake Tsana, in Abyssinia, as a storage reservoir for the Blue Nile, but the idea had to be abandoned for political reasons, and an alternative scheme .was adopted for the

(instruction of a barrage on tlic lame river, but within Sudan tcrri;ory, which will eventually enable i,000,000 acres to be brought under :ultivation. The risk remains, however, that the Abyssinians, for their Dwn purposes, might impound ths vater higher up, in Tsana 0 r elsewhere, thus depriving the Sudan of much essential moisture. They might ilso carry out the same policy on che Atbara. It appears a grotesque idea that the welfare of Egypt come to lepend to a large extent upon the will of a semi-civilised State. Abyssinia, however, is already a happy hunting ground for cosmopolitan :oncession seekers, amongst them ars some with financial resources anil engineering skill at oommand sufliaient to construct works which would retain a substantial portion of the vTite flow for Abyssinian irrigation. Not only so, but, in doing so, they would retain a still larger proportion of the fertilising mud, much of svhich is carried from the Abyssinian mountains down the Blue Nile to enrich Lower Egypt. Such a contingency may never arise, but the fact Df its possibility is alone sufficient to indicate the value of the Nile to the country where, as Mr. Roosevelt said recently, the British have perormed to perfection a task equally important and difficult. "Weekly Telegraph."