THE SHADOOF.
He shall pour the water out of his buckets.—_Book of Numbers._
In Egypt, where mythology, manners and customs, writing, and all the arts
appear never to have had a period of infancy, or of adolescence, but to
have come into being all in a perfected state and all together, it is
hard to say what is older than other things. It is so with everything
Egyptian; and so, of course, with the shadoof, the machine used in
raising water, by human labour, for irrigating the land. It is the oldest
machine with which we are historically acquainted: though, of course, it
implies the use of the plough, which, as well as the hoe, must have been
brought into the valley of the Nile by the immigrant ancestors of the
Egyptians.
Mechanically, the shadoof is an application of the lever. In no machine
which the wit of man, aided by the accumulations of science, has since
invented, is the result produced so great in proportion to the degree of
power employed. The lever of the shadoof is a long stout pole poised on a
prop. The pole is at right angles to the river. A large lump of clay from
the spot is appended to the inland end. To the river end is suspended a
goat-skin bucket. This is the whole apparatus. The man who is working it
stands on the edge of the river. Before him is a hole full of water,
fed from the passing stream. When working the machine, he takes hold of
the cord by which the empty bucket is suspended, and, bending down, by
the mere weight of his shoulders dips it in the water. He then rises,
with his hand still on the cord. His effort to rise gives the bucket full
of water an upward cant, which, with the aid of the equipoising lump of
clay at the other end of the pole, lifts it to a trough into which, as
it tilts on one side, it empties its contents. The man continues bending
down and rising up again in this manner for hours together, apparently
without more effort than that involved in these movements of his body.
What he has done has raised the water six or seven feet above the level
of the river. But if the river has subsided twelve or fourteen feet, it
will require another shadoof to be worked in the trough into which the
water of the first has been brought. If the river has sunk still more, a
third will be required before it can be lifted to the top of the bank,
so as to enable it to flow off to the fields that require irrigation. I
sometimes saw as many as twenty series of shadoofs at work, two or three
in each series, within a range of half a mile. The poor fellows who work
them are, except for the barest decency, completely divested of every
article of clothing: an almost invisible loin cloth, and a tight-fitting
cotton skull-cap, are the whole of their apparel. They work all day in
the wet, and in the sun. As the materials for the shadoof—the pole, the
prop, the skin, and the clay—are all to be had on the spot, the poor
fellah is able, in a few minutes, to set up a machine that is of great
service to him, at little or no cost.
The other machine used in Egypt for raising water is called the sakia.
This is the Persian water-wheel. It is a large wheel with a continuous
row of jars arranged on its tire, something like the buckets of a
dredging-machine. These jars dip up the water as the wheel revolves, and
empty it, as the further revolution of the wheel brings their mouths
downwards, into a trough. It is worked by bullocks, or buffaloes. A
few years back there were many more of these at work than there are at
present. A murrain, or rinderpest, having destroyed the cattle, the
fellahs were obliged to take their place, and revert to the old shadoof
of the early Pharaohnic times.