WANT OF WOOD IN EGYPT, AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
The trees of his forest shall be few, that a child may write
them.—_Isaiah._
Egypt has no woods or thickets. It would hardly possess a single tree
without the care of man. The few it has would soon perish if that care
were intermitted. Even the palm, which we regard as the tree of the
desert, cannot exist unless it be supplied with water. The species of
the trees one meets with commonly in Egypt do not exceed half-a-dozen.
They are the large-leaved acacia, the small-leaved thorny acacia, the
tamarisk, a variety of the Indian fig, the palm, and, occasionally in
Upper Egypt, the dôm palm.
From this dearth of wood follow several obvious consequences, which
may be worth noting. First, all the houses of the lower class, that
is, of the great mass of the people of Egypt, must be built of crude,
or sun-dried brick. There is no wood for posts and planks, or to burn
brick for such folk as they. This obliges them to live in houses that
are singularly mean; and, according to our ideas, insufficient for their
purpose. They can only have a ground-floor, for no ceilings can be made
without wood. Nor, for the same reason, can they have any roofs, there
is no wood for rafters. Nor, if they could manage to get the rafters,
would they be able to get the fuel for burning the tiles. It follows
that only a part of what ought to be the roof can be covered in, and that
in the rudest way, for protection against what heaven may send in the way
of heat, or cold, or wet. This partial covering is very ineffectual. It
consists of a few palm-leaves, or of the stalks of the millet and maize,
laid horizontally from wall to wall; upon this wheat and barley straw is
generally piled till it has been consumed by the donkeys, goats, camels,
and buffaloes. Such is the rule; a real serviceable roof being the
exception. These roofless low walls, which are the house, must also be
floorless, for there is no wood either for plank-flooring, or for burning
floor-bricks. Then what does duty for the floor must be dust. This makes
every house a flea-preserve.
A further consequence is, that within these floorless, roofless,
windowless, doorless mud enclosures there can be no such thing as
furniture—nothing to sit upon, nothing to stow anything away in, nothing
to put anything upon; not a cupboard, a chair, or a table. But this
matters little to a people who can always sit, and sleep on the dry
ground; and who have nothing to stow away. Everywhere I saw men, and
sometimes even women, sleeping out of doors, even in mid-winter.
The same cause obliged the old Egyptians also to build, for all classes,
with little, or no, wood. We have just seen that the rubbish heaps of
their cities are so vast as in many instances to have completely buried
the temples, which, together with many objects of Egyptian art, have thus
been preserved for us. Of course this could not have occurred had wood
been as largely used by them, as it is by ourselves, in domestic and
public architecture. This was, also, one cause of the massiveness and
grandeur of their style of architecture.
But the consequences on the life and habits of the people of this dearth
of wood are not yet exhausted. It also puts difficulties in the way of
their cooking their food. For instance, they cannot bake their bread as
often as they would wish. A family may not have fuel enough to admit of
the recurrence of this expenditure of it more frequently than perhaps
a dozen times in the year. In order, therefore, to keep their bread
sweet, they have to cut it into thin slices, and dry it in the sun. And
to obtain a sufficiency of fuel, for even these restricted uses, they
have to collect carefully, and to turn to account, everything that can
be made to burn. As I have mentioned elsewhere, their chief resource
for this purpose are the contributions they very thankfully receive
from their herbivorous animals. A great part of the time of the women
is spent in manufacturing this material into combustible cakes. And a
shockingly dirty process it is. The raw material is deposited in a hole
in the ground, together with a great deal of water. A woman, seated on
the ground, on the brink of the hole, stirs up the material and water
with her bare arms, which are immersed to beyond the elbow. This stirring
is continued till a smooth fluid mixture has been produced, which is then
left in this state, for the water to evaporate, and to drain off through
the ground. When the material has in this way arrived at a sufficiently
tough consistency it is made into thin cakes, which are set in the sun
to dry. When this has been effected, they are stored away for use. As
might have been expected, in the apportionment of domestic duties, this
manufacture generally falls to the lot of the more ancient dames.
Those, who are curious in tracing up to their sources the customs, and
practices, of different people, may refer many other things that they
will see, and some that they will not see, in Egypt, to this dearth of
wood. In agriculture no carts, or vehicles of any kind, are used: there
is no wood of which they might be made. It is, therefore, cheaper that
everything should be carried on donkeys and camels. Here, when you see a
tree, you are looking on what may be transformed into an essential part
of the instrument of transportation. The cart, or waggon, and the animals
that are to draw it, together form the complete instrument. In Egypt,
when you see a bundle of chopped straw, and a field of lucern, you are
looking on all, out of which the Egyptian means of land transportation
are to be created. In Egypt, when a donkey has any shoes, they consist
merely of a piece of flat iron, the size of the bottom of the hoof,
cut out of a thin plate. It is easy to cut this out, but it would be
expensive, where fuel is so scarce, to forge a shoe. This list might be
very largely increased.
Nor are we here in England, three thousand miles off, unaffected by the
niggardliness of nature to Egypt in this matter. The country possesses
railroads, steamboats, and sugar, and other, factories on a large scale,
but no fuel to create for them motive power. This must come from without,
and it is all supplied from English collieries, and brought in English
vessels. In return for it we get no insignificant portion of the produce
of the valley of the Nile. How strangely are things concatenated. The
rains that fall in the highlands of Abyssinia, and in equatorial Africa,
are grinding down pebbles in the channels of mountain torrents, and
washing away the vegetable mould, and transporting their infinitesimal
water-borne particles to Egypt, for the purpose of giving employment
to the coal-miners of Durham, and to the weavers of Manchester. The
intelligence and industry of England turn to account, through the medium
of Egypt, the evaporation that takes place on the Indian and South
Atlantic oceans. Such are the working and interworking of the physical
and mental machinery of this world of ours: or rather, perhaps, we have
here some slight indication of what they will one day become.