Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/95

 was dummed at its entrance into the gorge, the "sea" became gradually reduced to a semicircular morass, and would dry up altogether but for the sluices which admit the water required for irrigation purposes. It was no slight matter to have thus reclaimed an extensive district, where as many as one hundred and fifty villages are said to have flourished. But according to the most probable supposition, supported by a careful survey of the whole region, the more elevated portion of the reclaimed land was converted into the famous Lake Mœris, which was one of the wonders of the old world, and which, centuries after its disappearance, must still be ranked amongst the most astounding works of man. The remains of embankments in some places 200 feet broad at their base, and 60 feet high, appear to represent on the east side the outer enclosures of the vast basin which during the floods received the discharge of the Bahr-Yusef, estimated at about the twenty-sixth part of the whole Nile. At the angles of the embankment are still visible the remains of pyramids recording the fame of Amenemha III., by whom this stupendous reservoir was created some forty-seven centuries before the opening of the Suez Canal, Herodotus, who may perhaps have seen though he did not measure it, gives it an enormous circumference, far greater in fact than that of the whole Fayum. According to Linant, it occupied an area of 120 square miles in the eastern portion of the Fayum, and at the end of the floods its volume must have exceeded 100,000,000 cubic feet, A small portion of this prodigious storage may have served to irrigate the western Fayum; but nearly all the overflow taken from the Nile during high water was distributed over the plains during the dry season, and sufficed to irrigate 450,000 acres of land. None of the great modern reservoirs can be compared with this great work, either for size or skilful design. Most of them are merely artificial lakes, which receive the whole fluvial discharge, and distribute the excess to the lower river basin. But the stream itself is continually sapping the foundations, and too often bursting the banks of its reservoir. It would, however, be difficult now to restore Lake Mœris, whose bed has been so greatly raised by alluvial deposits that the retaining walls and embankments would have to be carried several yards higher than formerly.

The Bahr-Yusef is continued under diverse names to the delta, but in its lower course the discharge is very slight. Nearly all its feeders, as well as the other channels and watercourses, are gathered up by the main stream at the head of the delta, whence they again ramify in a thousand branches over the plains of Lower Egypt. Hence at this point the Nile presents much the same appearance as in Nubia, or still higher up at the Khartum confluence. It glides in a slow and regular current between its banks, reflecting in its stream the trees, gray mud villages, and here and there a few white buildings. Nothing sudden or abrupt in this vast and sleeping landscape, whose monotony is broken only by a few dhahabiyé, or Nile boats, and above which is suspended an everlasting azure firmament. On either side the narrow plains, the cliffs, the ravines, and terraces succeed each other in endless uniformity. In this land of simple outlines, little surprise is caused even by the regular forms of the pyramids skirting the western