atus a panorama of the old days seemed to come
before my eyes. The very life of the people depended upon the overflow
of the Nile. June 17th was one of the great days for on that day almost
as regular as the sunrise the upper Nile began to rise. A few days later
an anxious crowd gathered to see the water mark on the Nilometer begin
to come up. About July third the criers started on their daily rounds
through the city announcing the measurement. If it was up to normal the
people were happy and if not they were sad. When the rise was about
twenty feet the "Completion" or "Abundance of the Nile" was announced
and preparation was made for the opening of the canal which time was a
regular jubilee among the people.

All night long before this ceremony rockets were fired at intervals and
in the morning at the appointed time the governor and those with him
"cut the dam" and the inundation started. For more than a month the
canals were full, and the fields were flooded and a thin coat of fine
pulverized soil was spread over the ground like a carpet and when seed
was placed in the ground it grew like in a hothouse. At Cairo the Nile
would often rise twenty-five feet.

During these days a great deal of irrigating is done all through the
season. In some places ponderous machinery is used but to this day a
large portion of work is done by hand. One of the most common sights
along the Nile is the shadoof. This is a long pole with a weight on one
end and a bucket on the other. Hour after hour half dressed men and
women will dip up water and pour it into irrigation ditches. Great
wooden waterwheels are also used and an ox or donkey or man or woman or
a blinded camel will go round and round and you can hear this wooden
wheel squeak for a mile. The little buckets on the waterwheel keep an
almost endless stream flowing into the irrigation ditch.

Another method is a sort of a paddle wheel on a windlass upon which a
native will walk hour after hour. This turns a kind of an endless chain
something like the old-fashioned cistern pump with which we are all
familiar. In Egypt nearly everything is done by hand as man power is
cheaper than machinery. I saw them grading a railroad with wheelbarrows,
not even a cart or a donkey on the job. The great bridge across the Nile
used to be opened by hand and boats pulled through by hand. It was a
most interesting sight to the writer for a hundred or more men to get
hold of a large rope and begin to hea