IRRIGATION IN EGYPT.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9434, 3 May 1909, Page 2

IRRIGATION IN EGYPT.

Leas than thirty years ago Egypt was on the verge of utter rnin. Its happy position to-day is wholly to be attributed to British control, and in that control the work of irrigation has bulked largely. The completion of the Esneb dam marked another step In advance. The rainfall of Northern Egypt Is not much more than an Inch and a half a year, and large areas are practically rainless. Cultivation depends entirely on the Nile, which gives a strip of arable land eight to fonrteen miles wide. As it sweeps through the 3000 miles of its course the Nile brings down from Central Africa, about 68,000,000 tons of deiritna a year, raising the level of the outirated land at the rate of inches in a century. There are places where this detritus is 80 feet deep. The first great work for the control of the river after the beginning of British influence in 1883 .was the completion of the great barrage at the bead of the Delta. Another barrage was then built half way between Cairo and the sea. These two works increased the onlti•mded area by a million acres, and doubled the cotton crop of the district served. Then came the great dams at Assouan and Aasiout for regulation of the water supply of Upper Egypt. The whole cost of the latter was saved in one season, in 1902, when the Nile flood was exceptionally poor, and without the dam the crops would have been completely lost. The last dam, at Eaneh, is 110 miles below Assouan. It will store water for 350,000 acres, land enable two crops a yeai to be jgrown instead of one. The Assouan dam rests on solid rook; but at Esneh <the substratum is sand, and a cement .concrete floor nearly a hundred feet wide had to be laid down. The -work was completed in half the specified time of three years. The j .cost was over £1,000,000.