IRRIGATION IN EGYPT 



The above description applies to bulbs and perennial 

 plants with underground stores of food. Yet these are by 

 no means the only plants which manage to exist in the 

 Egyptian and Arabian desert. After a shower of rain a 

 whole crowd of tiny annuals suddenly develop from seed; 

 they come into full flower and have set their seed before they 

 are killed off by a return of the desert conditions, when the 

 effects of the rain have died away. These plants are not 

 really desert plants at all, for they only grow during the 

 short time that it is not a desert. They are like the 

 Ephemerid insects which live for a summer day only. 



Nor is it only in Egypt that we find such ephemerals. 

 Mr. Coville found them in the Colorado desert in North 

 America. The plants are quite different, but similar con- 

 ditions have brought about an entirely similar mode of life 

 on the other side of the globe ! In Colorado they seem to 

 be much influenced by the quantity of rain. Mr. Orcutt, 

 after the great rain of February, 1891, found plants of 

 Amaranthus (allied to our Love-Lies-Bleeding), which were 

 ten feet in height, but in 1892 he found specimens of the 

 same in the same place only nine inches high, though they 

 were perfect plants and in full flower ; in this last year there 

 was only the usual very scanty rainfall. 



It is, however, in deserts when man has set to work and 

 supplies water and strenuous labour, that the most wonderful 

 results appear. The whole of lower Egypt, Babylon, 

 Nineveh, Damascus, Baghdad, Palmyra, and other historic 

 cities, show what the desert can be made to produce. 



As one slowly steams up the Nile from Philae or Shellal 

 towards Wady Haifa, there are places where the brown, 

 regular layers of the Nubian Sandstone form cliffs which 

 advance almost to the water's edge. Yet there is a narrow 

 strip of green which fringes the water. 



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