:>10 EGYPTIAN AGRICULTURE. 



from salt or insufficient irrigation and yet the dineba lias 

 remained vigorous. It is an excellent green forage in 

 summer and autumn, and might be made into hay or 

 silage. Dineba may be sown from April till August. 

 On doubtful land it is by far the best crop to try. 



Rice needs abundant water and careful handling in its 

 earlier stages and on reclaiming land very often fails. 

 Sultani rice, sown in April or May, occupies the land for 

 six months. Sabaine rice, sown in August, can be carried 

 on by the Nile flood when water is abundant, and with 

 it there is not the same risk as with sultani rice. 



Samar, a reed used for making mats and rush-bottomed 

 chairs, is a hardy reclaiming crop cultivated largely in 

 the Wady Tumilat. 



Any of these crops show how the land is sweetening and 

 dineba is specially useful for the purpose. It may be 

 sown thinly merely to test the sweetness, and the result of 

 such field experiments has been exactly confirmed by 

 chemical tests in the laboratory. Where dineba grew well 

 the soil was sweet, and the goodness, mediocrity or badness 

 of different patches exactly conformed to the percentage 

 of salt found. 



Certain crops, such as rice, are credited with "consum- 

 ing salt. " This is pure fallacy. Rice grain and straw does 

 not contain one per cent, of ash, and of the ash about 

 one quarter only is potash and soda. No possible rice 

 crop could remove ten kilograms of salt from a feddan. 



When dineba or rice have been grown successfully, 

 they are followed by a winter crop of berseem, i.e. Egyp- 

 tian clover, but if dineba has not grown it is useless to 



