Man's oldest pursuit was undoubtedly the tilling of the soil. He may in
his earliest beginnings have combined therewith a certain amount of
hunting while he was waiting for his crops to grow, and was forced into
seeking wild fruits and turning up and experimenting on the various
forms of root, learning, too, doubtless with plenty of bitter
punishment, to distinguish between the good and nutritious and the
poisonous and bad.
As a matter of course, a certain amount of fighting would ensue. Wild
animals would be encountered, or fellow savages would resent his
intrusion upon lands where the acorns were most plentiful, or some tasty
form of fungus grew. But whether from natural bent or necessity, as
well as from his beginnings recorded in the ancient Book, he was a
gardener, and the natural outcome of gardening was, as ideas expanded,
his becoming a farmer.
The world has gone rolling on, and many changes have taken place, but
these pursuits remain unaltered. The love of a garden seems to be
inborn; and though probably there are children who have never longed to
have one of their own, they are rarities, for of whichever sex they be,
the love of this form of nature still remains.
There are those who garden or farm for pleasure, and there are those, of
course, who, either on a large or small scale, cultivate the soil for
profit, while the grades between are innumerable. But here in England,
towards the end of such a season as we have had--one that may be surely
termed a record--one is tempted to say, Where does the pleasure or the
profit come in?
Certainly during the present period, or cycle, or whatever it may be
termed, the English climate is deteriorating. Joined to that assertion
is the patent fact that the produce of the garden and farm has largely
gone down in price through the cheapness of the foreign imports thrown
upon the market, and the man with small or large capital who looks
forward to making a modest living out of the land, without any dreams of
fortune, may well pause before proceeding to invest his bawbees, and ask
himself, Where shall I go?
Thousands have debated this question for generations, with the result
that the Antipodes have been turned into Anglo-Saxon farms; Van Diemen's
Land has become another England, with its meadows, hedgerows, and
orchards; New Zealand, the habitat of tree-fern and pine, has been
transformed. Even the very surface has changed, and the land that in
the past hardly boasted a four-footed animal is now rich in its cattle;
while Australia, the dry and shadowless, the country of downs, has been
made alive with flocks, its produce mainly tallow and wool till modern
enterprise and chemistry rendered it possible for the frozen mutton to
reach England untainted after its long voyage across the tropics to our
homes.
To keep to the temperate or cold regions, the name of Canada or the
great North-West springs up as does the corn which fills our granaries;
while the more enterprising cultivators of the soil, who have had souls
above the ordinary plodding of the farmer's life--the fancy tillers, so
to speak--with the tendency towards gardening, produced our sugar from
the West Indies and British Guiana, and tobacco and cotton from the
Southern States, long ere the Stars and Stripes waved overhead; while,
to journey eastward, the gardens have flourished in India and Ceylon
with indigo, spices, and coffee; and later on, wherever suitable slopes
and terraces were found, the Briton has planted the attractive
glossy-leaved tea shrub, until the trade with China for its fragrant
popular produce has waned.
There are plenty of lands of promise for the cultivator, unfortunately
too often speculative and burdened by doubt. They are frequently
handicapped by distance, extremes of climate, and unsuitability to the
British constitution. As in the past, too, imagination often plays its
part, and the would-be emigrant hankers after something new, in spite of
the cloud of possible failure that may hover on his horizon.
There is, of course, a great attraction in the unknown, and untried
novelty is always tempting. But, on the other side, there is the old
and safe, the cultivation of a land which in the past has been
world-famed for its never-failing produce, its mighty granaries, and its
vast fertility, that can be traced back for thousands of years, whose
soil, far from becoming exhausted, is ever being renewed, and which at
the present time is undergoing a transformation that will make its
produce manifold.
Of course, the country which contains these qualities is the familiar
old land of Egypt, the dominion of the Khedive, which, in spite of its
wondrous fertility, has had little attraction for the earnest cultivator
of the earth. It has been the granary of the world for ages; but its
cultivation has been left to its own people, who have gone on with their
old-time barbaric tillage, leaving Nature, in her lavish bounteousness,
to do the rest.
In every way wonderful changes are coming over Egypt, where for
countless ages the policy of the people seemed to be devoted entirely,
as far as the vegetable world was concerned, to the growth of food, or
such fibrous plants as proved their suitability for the manufacture of
the light clothing they required. Any attempt to permanently beautify
the country by taking advantage of its fertility, and commencing the
planting to any great extent of that which was so lacking in the shape
of trees, was left in abeyance till the coming into power of the great
ancestor of the present Khedive, Mehemet Ali. This thinker, of broad
intellect, made some beginnings in this direction, and later on Ismail
Pacha gave a great impetus thereto by enlisting the services of a clever
French gardener, who, fully awakened at once to the possibilities of
climate and land, and with ideas running very much in favour of
landscape gardening, began to introduce and encourage the growth of
shade trees, a complete novelty in a country where the ideas of the
people seem to tend towards placing their dwellings in the full glare of
the sun.
Gardens began to spring up, trees were planted in suitable places, and
the start having been once fairly made, the love of imitation led to the
establishment of a taste or fashion, and planting has now gone on to
such an extent that there are those who are ready to assert that while
the face of Egypt is becoming changed, the presence of the
rapidly-growing and increasing trees is having its effect, through the
attraction and formation of clouds, upon the meteorology of the country.
If this continues, as it may, to a vast extent, the fertility of Egypt
will no longer be confined to the narrow strips on either side of the
Nile, but its deserts may become physical features of the past.
The idea of those in olden times was to pile up huge erections and to
let what came spontaneously grow as was its wont. Now the enlightenment
of the new rulers and the leavening of Western civilisation are working
wonders. That to which Ismail Pacha gave such a fillip is being
fostered and advanced by the present Khedive, and, the ball being well
set rolling, his people are finding out that nearly everything that
loves moisture and sunshine will grow prodigiously. It takes time, of
course, but many of the beautiful shade trees that have been planted
have in forty years reached a height of eighty feet, and become rich in
their heavy foliage. The varieties of the eucalyptus, not always the
most beautiful of trees from their greyish leafage and want of shadow,
are still a wonderful addition to a dry and thirsty land. Considering
their original habitat in Australia, it was a foregone conclusion that
they would do well here, and they have proved to be most rapid of
growth.
Then there is the magnificent Flamboyer des Indes, and scores of other
beautiful children of Nature, which only required care and fostering in
their tender years to prove their liking for their new home. Endless
are the trees that, once given a start, leave behind their scrubby,
starved appearance, and become in maturity well able to care for
themselves and beautify the prospect on every hand.
Acacias, with their perfumed blossoms; the deep green shady sycamore,
that good old favourite like the plane of the Levant; the feathery
tamarisk, and scores of ornamental trees, flourish well; while,
combining the ornamental with the useful, there is the fine,
slow-growing old mulberry, with its rich juicy fruit, and its
suggestions of the soft straw-coloured or golden yellow rustling silk;
for if ever there was a country favoured by Nature, in its dryness and
absence of rain, for the prosperity of the caterpillar of the silkworm
moth, it should be Egypt, where enterprise and a sensible use of capital
ought to leave Asia and Turkey in Europe behind.
Leaving trees and turning to flowers, gardens in Egypt can be made, and
are made, perfect paradises in the meaning of old Gerard and Parkinson;
for the country is a very rosery, where the modern decorative sorts
bloom well in company with the more highly scented old-fashioned kinds
largely cultivated for the distillation of that wonderfully persistent
essential oil, the otto or attar of roses.
Here the lover of a garden and of exotics can dispense with conservatory
or the protection of glass, and, giving attention to moisture and shade,
make his garden flush ruddily with the poinsettia, and may also find
endless pleasure in the cultivation of some of the more beautiful
varieties of the orchid family, which here in England demand the
assistance of a stove.
Perhaps the most attractive time for the visitor from England, who has
thoughts of settling in this country, to see it at its best is when the
Nile is rising to its height, bringing down from Equatorial regions its
full flow of riches and the means of supplying the cultivator with that
which will reward him for his labours beneath the torrid sun.
At this time the crops are approaching maturity; the vast fields of
maize have been passing through the various stages of green, waving,
flag-like leaf, and hidden immature cob, with its beautiful, delicate
tassel, prelude of the golden amber or black treasure that is to come
and gladden the eye of the spectator in every direction. The grassy
millet, or _dourra_, is equally beautiful in its wavy-wind-swept tracts;
the cotton crops are gathering strength prior to the swelling and
bursting of the silky boll; and the majestic sugar-cane towers up in its
rapid progress, till the whole country is smiling in preparation for the
gladsome laughter of the harvest that is to come, for it has been a busy
time. The fellaheen, in their thousands, have been occupied in that
wonderful irrigation which has been the careful distribution through
meandering canal, straight-cut dyke, and endless little rill, of the
lurid thick water of the Nile, laden with its rich plant-sustaining
fertility, to the roots of the thirsty plants, and stimulating them
beneath the ardent sunshine into a growth that is almost startling. In
other parts the same waters are being ingeniously led to the cultivated
lands that are being made ready for the more ordinary grain crops--the
wheat, the homely barley, and the Egyptian bean, the food of man and
beast alike; while in a country where grassy down and ordinary meadow,
such as form the pasture of sheep, oxen and kine at home, are unknown,
tract upon tract is annually sown with Egyptian clover, lentils, and
similar crops--ready for immediate use as cattle food in which the
animals can graze bit by bit as far as their tethering lines will
permit--for cutting and stacking up green in the form of ensilage, and
consumption when the crops are past--or for hay.
The granary of the world, the vast store-house for nations: people have
gone there to buy, but not to till; and yet it presents so many
qualities that the wonder is that it should have been so long neglected;
while now, in its state of transformation through the opening of the
great dam and the cutting and forming of miles more irrigating canal,
there is no bound to what may be done in the future. The time seems to
be approaching when Egypt will no longer be spoken of as a narrow strip
of fertile soil running from north to south and bordering the Nile, for
its future seems to be that the barren sand far back from its banks will
be turned into fertile land, adding its produce of corn and cotton to
the store-house of the world.
As is well-known, vast tracts of Egypt are by nature sterile; but upon
these barren primaeval sands there has been superimposed for uncountable
ages the alluvium of the Nile, so that, as an old writer says, Egypt
itself may be looked upon as the gift of one of the mightiest rivers of
the world. He speaks of the Nile as being the father of this country,
bounteous in its gift, a strange, mysterious, solitary stream which
bears down in its bosom the riches of the interior of Africa, carrying
onward from far away south the fertility of the luxuriant tropics, and
turning the sterile sand into the richest soil of the world. It is this
richness of the south that has changed the Delta from an arid waste into
a scene of matchless beauty.
One gazes upon it from the summit of one of the pyramids or some high
citadel, over cities and ruins of cities, palm grove, green savannah,
palace and garden, luxuriant cornfield, and olive grove. Far distant,
shimmering in a silvery haze and stretching away into the dimness of the
horizon, lies the boundless desert, now being rapidly reclaimed,
consequent upon the great barrage experiments for the supplying of the
many winding canals with the fertile waters of the parent river. And of
these still growing distributors of life, these bearers of commerce, the
numbers are almost beyond belief. They are the veins and arteries of
the country, depositing as they do the rich soil which furnishes
abundance, and then acting as the waterways upon which, in due time, the
harvests are borne throughout the length and breadth of the land.
There is a great discrepancy in the reports as to the number of these
canals, and statements made and chronicled a few years back are not of
much use as statistics at the present day; while the completion of the
great dam will give such an impulse to their formation that the mileage,
even if properly estimated now, will be useless as a basis ten years
hence.
One traveller, in his ignorance of the country, estimated the number of
these irrigating water distributors as only ninety, while another of
about the same date gives Upper Egypt alone six thousand. Probably,
though, in this instance he included every branch and branchlet that led
the water amongst the cultivated lands.
The water of these canals, renewed as it is by the annual risings of the
Nile, goes on steadily changing, wherever it is led, the primaeval sand
of the desert into rich deep soil, after the fashion, but on a grander
scale, of the ingenious way in which portions of fen and bog land in
north Lincolnshire and south Yorkshire have been transformed into
fertile farms. As compared to what is going on in Egypt, this process
is trivial in the extreme; but by man's forethought and ingenuity many a
peat bog and waste that aforetime grew nothing but reed and rush has
been made, by draining and leading upon it the muddy waters of the Ouse,
Trent, and their tidal tributaries, into rich and prosperous farms,
producers of the necessities of life. These warp farms, as they are
termed, stand high in favour with the cultivators of the soil. They
have taken years to produce, perhaps, and the process has consisted of
but one treatment.
In Egypt, on the contrary, this depositing of the rich mud goes on year
by year, adding fresh soil and additional fertility each season; and the
possibilities of increase are almost without limit; while the drainage
produced by the falling of the Nile, the sandy subsoil, and the
wonderful evaporation of this sunny, almost rainless land, entirely
preclude the newly fertilised tracts becoming sour and stale.
Those interested should know somewhat of the constituents of this Nile
mud, which is brought down from the south to be deposited, it must be
borne in mind, upon sand which in the course of cultivation will
naturally, as it is mingled with the mud, render it open, porous, and
highly suitable for vegetable growth. A rough analysis proves that
quite half of the deposit is argillaceous, or clayey earth, one fourth
carbonate of lime. These constituents alone should be sufficient to
gladden the heart of any farmer or gardener, without counting the iron,
carbonate of magnesia, and silica.
So many of our agricultural outposts are only to be reached by long and
tedious journeys across ocean and then inland. Egypt is, of course, in
Africa, but only a few days' journey from our own shores. The sea
transit is short and frequent; and the country, the ancient mysterious
land of the Dark Ages, is rapidly being opened out by rail. The
climate, in spite of the heat, is one of the finest in the world, and
its healthiness is proverbial; while, best of all for the would-be
adventurer, it is under an enlightened rule, beneath which progress and
civilisation are flourishing more and more.