DIFFICULTIES 85 



I have witnessed a Government pass a proposal for 

 an expensive pier or an opera house, disregarding 

 the fact that the death-rate in the town was 40 

 per 1,000. 



The filling up of borrow-pits and infiltration 

 water collections is often an expensive matter. In 

 Egypt, the cultivated area is restricted to the valley 

 and the delta of the Nile. And as there is no im- 

 permeable stratum of soil, the height of the subsoil 

 water varies with the level of the river. Every 

 autumn the level of the Nile rises owing to the flood 

 produced by the monsoon rains in Equatorial Africa, 

 and consequently the level of the subsoil water rises 

 too. There are throughout Egypt, in the cultivated 

 area and in the towns, many natural and artificial 

 hollows and depressions in the land surface, called 

 birkets. When the Nile has reached a sufficient 

 height the subsoil water infiltrates from beneath, 

 and the birkets become pools of fresh water. The 

 numbers of these pools and their extent varies with 

 the maximum height of the river at its annual flood, 

 but the water often remains in them for some weeks 

 after the river has begun to fall again. These pools 

 are suitable breeding-places for all species of mos- 

 quitos indigenous to Egypt, and the insects swarm. 

 In the towns and villages these birkets become open 

 cesspools, and the smell from them is terrible. In 

 Cairo, during the annual flood, the Nile water wells 

 up into the basements and cellars, and bursts the cess- 

 pools, and the whole town is converted into one large 

 sewage swamp in the high- flood years the years of 



