186 Sir Benjamin Baker [June 6, 



supply compensation water to the Welsh rivers aflfected thereby. 

 Well, the united contents of the whole of those reservoirs would be 

 less than half that of the great Nile Eeservoir. Again, the Nile 

 Reservoir would hold more than enough water for one year's full 

 domestic supply to every city, town, and village in the United King- 

 dom with its 42 million inhabitants. But possibly the best way 

 of giving an idea of the magnitude of the work, and its utility to 

 cultivation in a thirsty land, is by considering the volume of the 

 water issuing from the Reservoir during the three or four summer 

 months, when scarcity of supply prevails in the river and the needs 

 of the cultivators are greatest. At that time the flow from the Reser- 

 voir will be equivalent to a river double the size of the Thames in 

 mean annual flood condition. It will be recognised at once that a 

 good many buckets would have to be set at work to bale out a river 

 like that, and yet the scarcity of water in the Nile itself, and in the 

 canals, during the months of April, May and June, is such that even 

 dipping the water out of the channels in buckets has to be controlled 

 by strict regulations. Thus, two years ago, when the Nile was below 

 the average in summer discharge, it was decreed in Upper Egypt that 

 the "lifting machines," which include the shadoof, or bucket-and- 

 pole system, and the sakieh, or oxen-driven chain of buckets, should 

 be worked not more than from five to eleven consecutive days, and 

 stop the following nine to thirteen days, between the middle of April 

 and the middle of July ; and the order in which the difierent districts 

 were to receive a supply was carefully specified, so that, as far as 

 possible, every crop should get watered once in about three weeks. 

 When it is remembered that a single watering of an acre of land 

 means, where shadoofs are concerned, raising by manual power about 

 400 tons of water to varying heights up to 25 feet, and that four or 

 five waterings are required to raise a summer crop, it will be seen 

 what a vast amount of human labour is saved throughout the world 

 by the providential circumstance that in ordinary cases water tumbles 

 down from the clouds, and has not, as in Egypt, to be dragged up 

 from channels and wells. Shadoof work, under average conditions, 

 involves one man's labour for at least one hundred days for each acre 

 of summer crop ; so that even at 6d. per day for labour, the extra 

 cost of cultivation due to the absence of rain would amount to 60s. 

 per acre. 



The great Nile Reservoir and Dam at Aswan, the Barrage at 

 Asyut, and various supplementary works in the way of distributiog 

 canals and regulators, are designed with the object of mitigating the 

 evils enumerated above, by supplying in summer a larger volume of 

 water at a higher level in the canals, so that not only can more land 

 be irrigated, but that labour in lifting water will be saved. When the 

 International Commission, eight years ago, recommended the construc- 

 tion of a large reservoir somewhere in the Nile valley, I was desirous 

 of knowing what would be the opinion of a real old-fashioned native 

 landowner on the subject ; and was introduced to one whose qualitica- 



