The Nile is a blessing only
half appreciated; the time will arrive when people will look in
amazement upon a mighty Egypt, whose waving crops shall extend,
far beyond the horizon, upon those sandy and thirsty deserts
where only the camel can contend with exhausted nature. Men will
look down from some lofty point upon a network of canals and
reservoirs, spreading throughout a land teeming with fertility,
and wonder how it was that, for so many ages, the majesty of the
Nile had been concealed. Not only the sources of that wonderful
river had been a mystery from the earliest history of the world,
but the resources and the power of the mighty Nile are still
mysterious and misunderstood.
In all rainless countries, artificial irrigation is the first law
of nature, it is self-preservation; but, even in countries where
the rainfall can be depended upon with tolerable certainty,
irrigation should never be neglected; one dry season in a
tropical country may produce a famine, the results of which may
be terrible, as instanced lately by the unfortunate calamity in
Orissa. The remains of the beautiful system of artificial
irrigation that was employed by the ancients in Ceylon, attest
the degree of civilization to which they had attained; in that
island the waters of various rivers were conducted into valleys
that were converted into lakes, by dams of solid masonry that
closed the extremity, from which the water was conducted by
artificial channels throughout the land.
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