416 Sir Colin Scott-Moncrieff [Jan. 25, 



future I trust that with the feeblest Nile flood it will be possible to 

 pour water over every acre of the land. 



The question of drainage was very thoroughly taken up. Twelve 

 years ago it may be said that there were no drainage channels in 

 Egypt. Two years ago there were about 1000 miles of such 

 channels, some with beds as wide as 60 feet and flowing deep enough 

 to carry cargo boats, others with beds only 3 or 4 feet wide. I am 

 glad to say by these means large tracts in Lower Egypt which had 

 been abandoned as totally ruined, have now been restored to cultiva- 

 tion. The level of the lake in the Fay urn was reduced by 13 feet 

 between 1885 and 1893, and most of the inundated lands around it 

 have been again dried. 



I have already mentioned the cruel hardship of the corvee, the 

 serf army of 85,000 men who were employed in the canal clearances 

 from January to July, nearly half the year. I believe this institution 

 was as old as the Pharaohs, and it was not easy to abolish it. But 

 of course it went sorely against our British grain. Little by little we 

 got money to enable us to pay our labour. By an annual outlay of 

 400,000Z. this spring ctnwee has entirely ceased since 1889, and now 

 the Egyptian labourer carries out these clearances in as free a manner 

 as his brother in Middlesex, and gets paid for his work. 



Having thus, to the best of our powers, utilised the water in the 

 river flowing past us, we turned our attention to the storage of the 

 surplus waters. Without some such storage it is impossible to 

 increase the cultivation during the Low Nile. All the water is used 

 up. During High Nile there is always a great volume escaping 

 useless to the sea. 



There are two ways in which the water may be stored ; either by 

 throwing a dam right across the river and forming a great lake above 

 it, or, if such a place can be found, by diverting the flood water into 

 some suitable hollow, and drawing it off from there at the season of 

 low supply, as done by Herodotus' celebrated Lake Mceris. At one 

 time there was a hope that such a storage basin might be found. An 

 American gentleman, named Mr. Cope Whitehouse, in search of the 

 real Mceris, found a very remarkable saucer-shaped depression just 

 south of the Fayum. We knew it could not have been Mceris, 

 because in its bed we found no traces of a deposit of Nilotic mud, but 

 it might be possible all the same to utilise it. The place was very 

 carefully surveyed, and the project was estimated ; but it was found 

 that the cost of conveying the water into this basin would be so great 

 that it was out of the question. 



Attention was then turned to the possible sites where a stone dam 

 might be built right across the river. The southern boundary of 

 Egypt just now is near Wady Haifa, the second cataract. It is no 

 use going to look for sites south of this, for the country is in the 

 hands of the Mahdi and his fierce dervish soldiers. North of this 

 point, unquestionably the best site — perhaps the only possible site — is 

 where the Nile valley is traversed by a broad dyke of hard Syenite 



