SECOND GREAT CATARACT.

A TRANSPORT ON THE NILE.

SIXTH AND LAST CATARACT.

Now for the work of the dam. On an average during the period of collection it holds, or held up when I saw it, about 10,000,000 tons of water a day, or let us say some eight per cent. of the total flow of the Nile. The collection ceases in March, after which only sufficient water is caught to balance the loss by evaporation. Then in June and July, when the river is at its lowest and the thirsty land aches for moisture, by degrees these pent-up waters are let loose, doubling the natural flow of the Nile at that time of the year. So it comes about that some 300,000 acres of the narrow area of Egypt that formerly produced but one crop, now produces two, or perhaps three, which means a matter of some millions of pounds’ worth of extra produce garnered in each year.

Nor is this all, for the dam is to be raised another fourteen feet in height. This, it is said, will practically double its efficiency and the area of land it benefits. Yet there is a sad side to this triumphant story. Above the dam stand the islands of Philae which the ancients called the City of Isis, and on them some of the most beautiful though not the oldest of the Egyptian temples. Already, owing to the operation of the dam, these temples are flooded far up their walls. When first I visited Egypt, over twenty years ago, I walked about their courts on foot; when I returned recently I sailed them in a boat. The sight was sad to see, but soon it will be worse, for when the dam is raised “Pharaoh’s bed” and the other lovely ruins of Philae must be submerged and with all their sculptures and paintings hidden and, in the end, destroyed. Thus the romance of the religions of the Past is doomed to give way to the romance of the prosperity of the Present. Philae must go, but since bread will always breed an eater, within a few years’ time there will be hundreds of thousands more Egyptians, most of them hating and agitating against the Western Power that brought them into being. A somewhat thankless task, perhaps, yet surely herein lies the real romance of the modern Nile, that the care and genius of distant England should do more than all the Pharaohs ever did to utilize its wasted wealth for the benefit of Egypt and her inhabitants.