For the last month I have been travelling through the farms of the Nile valley. I have visited many parts of the delta, a region where the tourist seldom stops, and have followed the narrow strip that borders the river for several hundred miles above Cairo.

The delta is the heart of Egypt. It has the bulk of the population, most of the arable land, the richest soil, and the biggest crops. While it is one of the most thickly settled parts of the world, it yields more to the acre than any other region on earth, and its farm lands are the most valuable. I am told that the average agricultural yield for all Europe nets a profit of thirty-five dollars per acre, but that of Lower Egypt amounts to a great deal more. Some lands produce so much that they are renting for fifty dollars an acre, and there are instances where one hundred dollars is paid.

I saw in to-day’s newspapers an advertisement of an Egyptian land company, announcing an issue of two and one half million dollars’ worth of stock. The syndicate says in its prospectus that it expects to buy five thousand acres of land at “the low rate of two hundred dollars per acre,” and that by spending one hundred and fifty thousand dollars it can make that land worth four hundred dollars per acre within three years. Some of this land would now bring from two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars per acre, and is renting for twenty dollars per acre per annum. The tract lies fifty miles north of Cairo and is planted in cotton, wheat, and barley.

Such estates as the above do not often come into the market, however. Most of Egypt is in small farms, and little of it is owned by foreigners. Six sevenths of the farms belong to the Egyptians, and there are more than a million native land owners. Over one million acres are in tracts of from five to twenty acres each. Many are even less than an acre in size. The number of proprietors is increasing every year and the fellaheen, or fellahs, are eager to possess land of their own. It used to be that the Khedive had enormous estates, but when the British Government took possession some of the khedivial acres came to it. These large holdings have been divided and have been sold to the fellaheen on long-time and easy payments. Many who then bought these lands have paid for them out of their crops and are now rich. As it is to-day there are but a few thousand foreigners who own real estate in the valley of the Nile.

The farmers who live here in the delta have one of the garden spots of the globe to cultivate. The Nile is building up more rich soil every year, and the land, if carefully handled, needs but little fertilization. It is yielding two or three crops every twelve months and is seldom idle. Under the old system of basin irrigation the fields lay fallow during the hot months of the summer, but the canals and dams that have now been constructed enable much of the country to have water all the year round, so that as soon as one crop is harvested another is planted.

The whole of the delta is one big farm dotted with farm villages and little farm cities. There are mud towns everywhere, and there are half-a-dozen big agricultural centres outside the cities of Alexandria and Cairo. Take, for instance, Tanta, where I am at this writing. It is a good-sized city and is supported by the farmers. It is a cotton market and it has a great fair, now and then, to which the people come from all over Egypt to buy and sell. A little to the east of it is Zagazig, which is nearly as large, while farther north, upon the east branch of the Nile, is Mansura, another cotton market, with a rich farming district about it. Damietta and Rosetta, at the two mouths of the Nile, and Damanhur, which lies west of the Rosetta branch of the Nile, not far from Lake Edku, are also big places. There are a number of towns ranging in population from five to ten thousand.

The farms are nothing like those of the United States. We should have to change the look of our landscape to imitate them. There are no fences, no barns, and no haystacks. The country is as bare of such things as an undeveloped prairie. The only boundaries of the estates are little mud walls; and the fields are divided into patches some of which are no bigger than a tablecloth. Each patch has furrows so made that the water from the canals can irrigate every inch.

The whole country is cut up by canals. There are large waterways running along the branches of the Nile, and smaller ones connecting with them, to such an extent that the face of the land is covered with a lacework veil of little streams from which the water can be let in and out. The draining of the farms is quite as important as watering, and the system of irrigation is perfect, inasmuch as it brings the Nile to every part of the country without letting it flood and swamp the lands.

Few people have any idea of the work the Egyptians have to do in irrigating and taking care of their farms. The task of keeping these basins in order is herculean. As the Nile rushes in, the embankments are watched as the Dutch watch the dikes of Holland. They are patrolled by the village headmen and the least break is filled with stalks of millet and earth. The town officials have the right to call out the people to help, and no one refuses. If the Nile gets too high it sometimes overflows into the settlements and the mud huts crumble. During the flood the people go out in boats from village to village. The donkeys, buffaloes, and bullocks live on the dikes, as do also the goats, sheep, and camels.

The people sow their crops as soon as the floods subside. Harvest comes on within a few months, and unless they have some means of irrigation, in addition to the Nile floods, they must wait until the following year before they can plant again. With a dam like the one at Aswan, the water supply can be so regulated that they can grow crops all the year round. This is already the condition in a great part of the delta, and it is planned to make the same true of the farms of Upper Egypt.

As for methods of raising the water from the river and canals and from one level to another, they vary from the most modern of steam pumps and windmills to the clumsy sakieh and shadoof, which are as old as Egypt itself. All the large land owners are now using steam pumps. There are many estates, owned by syndicates, which are irrigated by this means, and there are men who are buying portable engines and pumps and hiring them out to the smaller farmers in much the same way that threshing machines are rented in the United States and Canada. Quite a number of American windmills are already installed. Indeed, it seems to me almost the whole pumping of the Nile valley might be done by the wind. The breezes from the desert as strong as those from the sea sweep across the valley with such regularity that wind pumps could be relied upon to do efficient work.

At present, however, water is raised in Egypt mostly by its cheap man power or by animals. Millions of gallons are lifted by the shadoof. This is a long pole balanced on a support. From one end of the pole hangs a bucket, and from the other a heavy weight of clay or stone, about equal to the weight of the bucket when it is full of water. A man pulls the bucket down into the water, and by the help of the weight on the other end, raises it and empties it into a canal higher up. He does this all day long for a few cents, and it is estimated that he can in ten days lift enough water to irrigate an acre of corn or cotton. At this rate there is no doubt it could be done much cheaper by pumps.

Another rude irrigation machine found throughout the Nile valley from Alexandria to Khartum is the sakieh, which is operated by a blindfolded bullock, buffalo, donkey, or camel. It consists of a vertical wheel with a string of buckets attached to its rim. As the wheel turns round in the water the buckets dip and fill, and as it comes up they discharge their contents into a canal. This vertical wheel is moved by another wheel set horizontally, the two running in cogs, and the latter being turned by some beast of burden. There is usually a boy, a girl, or an old man, who sits on the shaft and drives the animal round.

The screech of these sakiehs is loud in the land and almost breaks the ear drums of the tourists who come near them. I remember a remark that one of the Justices of our Supreme Court made while we were stopping together at a hotel at Aswan with one of these water-wheels in plain sight and hearing. He declared he should like to give an appropriation to Egypt large enough to enable the people to oil every sakieh up and down the Nile valley. I doubt, however, whether the fellaheen would use the oil, if they had it, for they say that the blindfolded cattle will not turn the wheel when the noise stops.

I also saw half-naked men scooping up the water in baskets and pouring it into the little ditches, into which the fields are cut up. Sometimes men will spend not only days, but months on end in this most primitive method of irrigation.

The American farmer would sneer at the old-fashioned way in which these Egyptians cultivate the soil. He would tell them that they were two thousand years behind the time, and, still, if he were allowed to take their places he would probably ruin the country and himself. Most of the Egyptian farming methods are the result of long experience. In ploughing, the land is only scratched. This is because the Nile mud is full of salts, and the silt from Abyssinia is of such a nature that the people have to be careful not to plough so deep that the salts are raised from below and the crop thereby ruined. In many cases there is no ploughing at all. The seed is sown on the soft mud after the water is taken off, and pressed into it with a wooden roller or trodden in by oxen or buffaloes.

Where ploughs are used they are just the same as those of five thousand years ago. I have seen carvings on the tombs of the ancient Egyptians representing the farm tools used then, and they are about the same as those I see in use to-day. The average plough consists of a pole about six feet long fastened to a piece of wood bent inward at an acute angle. The end piece, which is shod with iron, does the ploughing. The pole is hitched to a buffalo or ox by means of a yoke, and the farmer walks along behind the plough holding its single handle, which is merely a stick set almost upright into the pole. The harrow of Egypt is a roller provided with iron spikes. Much of the land is dug over with a mattock-like hoe.

Most of the grain here is cut with sickles or pulled out by the roots. Wheat and barley are threshed by laying them inside a ring of well-pounded ground and driving over them a sledge that rests on a roller with sharp semicircular pieces of iron set into it. It is drawn by oxen, buffaloes, or camels. Sometimes the grain is trodden out by the feet of the animals without the use of the rollers, and sometimes there are wheels of stone between the sled-runners which aid in hulling the grain. Peas and beans are also threshed in this way. The grain is winnowed by the wind. The ears are spread out on the threshing floor and the grains pounded off with clubs or shelled by hand. Much of the corn is cut and laid on the banks of the canal until the people have time to husk and shell it.

The chief means of carrying farm produce from one place to another is on bullocks and camels. The camel is taken out into the corn field while the harvesting is going on. As the men cut the corn they tie it up into great bundles and hang one bundle on each side of his hump. The average camel can carry about one fifth as much as one horse hitched to a wagon or one tenth as much as a two-horse team. Hay, straw, and green clover are often taken from the fields to the markets on camels. Such crops are put up in a baglike network that fits over the beast’s hump and makes him look like a hay or straw-stack walking off upon legs. Some of the poorer farmers use donkeys for such purposes, and these little animals may often be seen going along the narrow roads with bags of grain balanced upon their backs.

I have always looked upon Egypt as devoted mostly to sugar and cotton. I find it a land of wheat and barley as well. It has also a big yield of clover and corn. The delta raises almost all of the cotton and some of the sugar. Central and Upper Egypt are grain countries, and in the central part Indian and Kaffir corn are the chief summer crops. Kaffir corn is, to a large extent, the food of the poorer fellaheen, and is also eaten by the Bedouins who live in the desert along the edges of the Nile valley. Besides a great deal of hay, Egypt produces some of the very best clover, which is known as bersine. It has such rich feeding qualities that a small bundle of it is enough to satisfy a camel.

This is also a great stock country. The Nile valley is peppered with camels, donkeys, buffaloes, and sheep, either watched by herders or tied to stakes, grazing on clover and other grasses. No animal is allowed to run at large, for there are no fences and the cattle thief is everywhere in evidence. The fellaheen are as shrewd as any people the world over, so a strayed animal would be difficult to recover. Much of the stock is watched by children. I have seen buffaloes feeding in the green fields with naked brown boys sitting on their backs and whipping them this way and that if they attempt to get into the crops adjoining. The sheep and the goats are often watched by the children or by men who are too old to do hard work. The donkeys, camels, and cows are usually tied to stakes and can feed only as far as their ropes will reach.

The sheep of Egypt are fine. Many of them are of the fat-tailed variety, some brown and some white. The goats and sheep feed together, there being some goats in almost every flock of sheep.

The donkey is the chief riding animal. It is used by men, women, and children, and a common sight is the veiled wife of one of these Mohammedan farmers seated astride one of the little fellows with her feet high up on its sides in the short stirrups. But few camels are used for riding except by the Bedouins out in the desert, and it is only in the cities that many wheeled vehicles are to be seen.

Suppose we go into one of the villages and see how these Egyptian farmers live. The towns are collections of mud huts with holes in the walls for windows. They are scattered along narrow roadways at the mercy of thick clouds of dust. The average hut is so low that one can look over its roof when seated on a camel. It seldom contains more than one or two rooms, and usually has a little yard outside where the children and the chickens roll about in the dust and where the donkey is sometimes tied.

Above some of the houses are towers of mud with holes around their sides. These towers are devoted to pigeons, which are kept by the hundreds and which are sold in the markets as we sell chickens. The pigeons furnish a large part of the manure of Egypt both for gardens and fields. The manure is mixed with earth and scattered over the soil.

Almost every village has its mosque, or church, and often, in addition, the tomb of some saint or holy man who lived there in the past. The people worship at such tombs, believing that prayers made there avail more than those made out in the fields or in their own huts.

There are no water works in the ordinary country village. If the locality is close to the Nile the drinking and washing water is brought from there to the huts by the women, and if not it comes from the village well. It is not difficult to get water by digging down a few feet anywhere in the Nile valley; and every town has its well, which is usually shaded by palm trees. It is there that the men gather about and gossip at night, and there the women come to draw water and carry it home upon their heads.

The farmers’ houses have no gardens about them, and no flowers or other ornamental decoration. The surroundings of the towns are squalid and mean, for the peasants have no comforts in our sense of the word. They have but little furniture inside their houses. Many of them sleep on the ground or on mats, and many wear the same clothing at night that they wear in the daytime. Out in the country shoes, stockings, and underclothes are comparatively unknown. Only upon dress-up occasions does a man or woman put on slippers.

The cooking and housekeeping are done entirely by the women. The chief food is a coarse bread made of corn or millet baked in thick cakes. This is broken up and dipped into a kind of a bean stew seasoned with salt, pepper, and onions. The ordinary peasant seldom has meat, for it is only the rich who can afford mutton or beef. At a big feast on the occasion of a wedding, a farming nabob sometimes brings in a sheep which has been cooked whole. It is eaten without forks, and is torn limb from limb, pieces being cut out by the guests with their knives.

Of late Egypt has begun to raise vegetables for Europe. The fast boats from Alexandria to Italy carry green stuff, especially onions, of which the Nile valley is now exporting several million dollars’ worth per annum. Some of these are sent to England, and others to Austria and Germany.

As for tobacco, Egypt is both an exporter and importer. “Egyptian” cigarettes are sold all over the world, but Egypt does not raise the tobacco of which they are made. Its cultivation has been forbidden for many years, and all that is used is imported from Turkey, Greece, and Bosnia. About four fifths of it comes from Turkey.

Everyone in Egypt who can afford it smokes. The men have pipes of various kinds, and of late many cigarettes have been coming into use. A favourite smoke is with a water pipe, the vapour from the burning tobacco being drawn by means of a long tube through a bowl of water upon which the pipe sits, so that it comes cool into the mouth.

The chicken industry of Egypt is worth investigation by our Department of Agriculture. Since the youth of the Pyramids, these people have been famous egg merchants and the helpful hen is still an important part of their stock. She brings in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, for her eggs form one of the items of national export. During the last twelve months enough Egyptian eggs have been shipped across the Mediterranean to England and other parts of Europe to have given one to every man, woman, and child in the United States. Most of them went to Great Britain.

The Egyptians, moreover, had incubators long before artificial egg hatching was known to the rest of the world. There is a hatchery near the Pyramids where the farmers trade fresh eggs for young chicks at two eggs per chick, and there is another, farther down the Nile valley, which produces a half million little chickens every season. It is estimated that the oven crop of chickens amounts to thirty or forty millions a year, that number of little fowls being sold by the incubator owners when the baby chicks are about able to walk.

Most of our incubators are of metal and many are kept warm by oil lamps. Those used here are one-story buildings made of sun-dried bricks. They contain ovens which are fired during the hatching seasons. The eggs are laid upon cut straw in racks near the oven, and the firing is so carefully done that the temperature is kept just right from week to week. The heat is not gauged by the thermometer, but by the judgment and experience of the man who runs the establishment. A fire is started eight or ten days before the eggs are put in, and from that time on it is not allowed to go out until the hatching season is over. The eggs are turned four times a day while hatching. Such establishments are cheaply built, and so arranged that it costs almost nothing to run them. One that will hatch two hundred thousand chickens a year can be built for less than fifty dollars, while for about a dollar and a half per day an experienced man can be hired to tend the fires, turn the eggs, and sell the chickens.