514 
THE NILE CATARACTS. 
is easily explained. In that last 1 800 miles of its course it receives no 
tributary stream, it flows, in fact, through a rainless region, but all 
the way through that desert region it is losing water, the sand and the 
sun are sucking it out of the broad channel, and by the time it reaches 
Egypt it has nearly lost one out of every three gallons which it held 
at Berber. It still has sufficient volume, however, to pour past Cairo 
a total current which is estimated, roughly speaking, at 100 billions of 
tons of water in the year, the largest aggregate of water being in the 
month of October, when about 20 billion tons flow by Cairo, and the 
smallest in June, when one billion 500 million tons pass in the month. 
But perhaps more curious are the figures dealing with the proportions 
of solids in suspension in the water ; these have been very carefully 
measured and found to give a total of 50 million tons of most fertilising 
substances in one year, the largest amount being in the month of 
August, when 23 million tons are carried down to the Delta. In 
addition to these enormous quantities of fertilising matter, the river 
has in solution a furthur quantity of 15 million tons. Up to the time 
of Mehemet Ali the flood water of the Nile passing the banks of the 
river overlay the whole surface of the Delta for about 100 days, or say 
during August, September, and October, but Mehemet Ali began a 
system which has since been continued. It was to confine the main 
stream, in the season of flood, to its banks, and lead off the water 
through a vast net-work of canals through the Delta, the water from 
which would be regulated and let out to irrigate the land, but not to 
flood it. It has been said that this was a totally new system of water¬ 
ing in the annals of Egypt, but I am not so certain of that, for we 
read in the Bible, when dealing with the Exodus, these words addressed 
to the Israelites :—“ The land whither thou goest in to possess it is 
not as the land of Egypt from whence ye came out, where thou sowest 
the seeds, and watereth with thy foot as a garden of: herbs, but the 
land whither ye go to possess is a land of hills and valleys, and drinketh 
the water of the rain of Heaven.” To-day you may still see through¬ 
out the Delta the fellah watering the ground with his foot, opening and 
closing the mud barrier of the irrigation channel which carries the 
water from the canal to his fields. 
Before I pass from the subject of the annual inundation of the Nile, 
I would mention that I once met a man who had travelled some 1500 
miles along the river before he found out that the inundation was an 
event of yearly occurrence. He had before imagined, he said, that 
it took place every two years. “ The crane and the swallow observe 
time,” says an Arabic proverb ; there are some men, clearly, who 
would not do either as cranes or swallows. 
And now it will be time to turn from the Nile of Egypt to the Nile 
of the Cataracts. 
And first let us briefly describe a cataract. The general stone of 
the desert is grey sandstone, which m the lapse of ages has yielded to 
the action of the water, and has become hollowed out into a river 
channel of more or less depth and regularity. But first at Assuan, 
then above Haifa, and above that again, recurring at frequent intervals, 
