Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/106

 the wells does not begin to rise for eight or ten days, while at the distance of half a mile it is delayed till the floods are actually subsiding. Hence the curious phenomenon that, when the Nile is at its lowest ebb, the water in wells at a distance from the stream rises some 10 or 12 feet higher than the river itself. The cultivators are thus enabled to continue the work of irrigation, which would otherwise be impossible.

The canals and transverse ditches utilised as a means of communication between the villages cut up all the cultivated lands into a vast "chessboard," whose parting lines are, so to say, alternately raised and sunk below the surface. The vivifying fluid circulates everywhere, like blood in the animal arterial system. But the maintenance of this intricate organism involves enormous care, the least disorder in these almost level plains often sufficing to cause crevasses and obstructions, and converting the flowing streams into stagnant waters. Worn out by ceaseless toil,

harassed and disheartened by official rapacity, the fellahin sometimes lack the energy required to keep in good order the canals that are indispensable to feed the primitive appliances for irrigating their fields. On the large estates the water is raised by means of the sakiyeh, a system of revolving buckets like those of Syria, worked in Egypt by oxen and asses, in Nubia by camels. But most of the peasantry make use of the so-called shadifs, vessels or baskets attached to both ends of a balanced lever, and by two men lowered and raised alternately, and discharging their contents into a distributing rill. A shadif will thus raise the water to a height of 8 or 10 feet, a second and even a third contrivance of the same kind successively carrying it to the highest required level. But very little of the water that might be obtained for irrigation purposes is secured by this rudimentary apparatus. Of the 4,200 billions of cubic feet yearly discharged by the Nile, not more than 175 billions are thus utilised by the riverain populations, so that not more than half, or perhaps a third, of the arable land is brought under cultivation. Scarcely forty