lEKIGATION IN EGYPT. 439 



the fall of rain in the territory of the Pharaohs is not two inches 

 in the year. The subsoil of the whole valley is pervaded with 

 moisture by infiltration from the Nile, and water can everywhere 

 be found at the depth of a few feet. Were irrigation suspended, 

 and Egypt abandoned, as in that case it must be, to the opera- 

 tions of nature, there is no doubt that trees, the roots of which 

 penetrate deeply, would in time estabhsh themselves on the de- 

 serted soil, fill the valley with verdure, and perhaps at last temper 

 the climate, and even call down abundant rain from the heavens.* 

 But the immediate effect of discontinuing irrigation would be, 

 first, an immense reduction of the evaporation from the valley in 

 the dry season, and then a greatly augmented dryness and heat 

 of the atmosphere. Even the almost constant north wind — the 

 strength of which would be increased in consequence of these 

 <;hanges — would little reduce the temperature of the narrow cleft 

 between the burning mountains which hem in the channel of the 

 Mle, so that a single year would transform the most fertile of 

 soils to the most barren of deserts, and render uninhabitable a 

 territory that irrigation makes capable of sustaining as dense a 

 population as has ever existed in any part of the world.f Whether 

 man found the valley of the ISTile a forest, or such a waste as I 

 have just described, we do not historically know. In either case, 

 he has not simply converted a wilderness into a garden, but has 

 unquestionably produced extensive ehmatic change,:}: 



* The date and ttie daum palm, the sont and many other acacias, the caraub, 

 the sycamore and other trees grow in Egypt without irrigation, and would 

 doubtless spread through the entire valley in a few years. 



f Wilkinson states that the total population, which, two hundred years ago, 

 was estimated at 4,000,000, amounted till lately to only about 1,800,000 souls, 

 Laving been reduced since the year 1800 from 2,500,000 to less than 2,000,000. 

 — HanMook for Travellers in Egypt, p. 10. The population at the end of the 

 year 1869 is computed at 5,215,000. — BolUttino della Soc. Oeog. Ital., vol. v., 

 pt. iii., p. 215. This estimate doubtless includes countries bordering on the 

 upper Nile not embraced in Wilkinson's statistics. 



X Ritter supposes Egypt to have been a sandy desert when it was first oc- 

 cupied by man. " The first inhabitant of the sandy valley of the Nile was a 

 desert-dweller, as his neighbors right and left, the Libyan, the nomade Arab, 

 still are. But the civilized people of Egypt transformed, by canals, the waste 

 into the richest granary of the world ; they liberated themselves from the 

 shackles of the rock and sand desert, in the midst of which, by a wise dis- 

 tribution of the fluid through the solid geographical form, by irrigation in 



