Without doubt the Delta is a splendid region for settlement for any
young agriculturist who possesses health, energy, and a natural tendency
towards those industrious habits peculiar to the successful men of our
country, who have always been willing to metaphorically and really take
off their coats and do whatever is necessary by way of example. To
succeed in Egypt we must take it for granted that he possesses moderate
means, or, say, very moderate means, just sufficient to make a small
commencement by hiring; or, far better, by the purchase of land, which
can now safely be done with good legal security and at a price that
before long will in all probability bound upwards to double or even
quadruple its present figure. But the thoroughly good sterling advice
of the authority already quoted--advice similar in nature has often been
before given to intending settlers in Australia--is that a year at least
should first be spent in gaining a knowledge of the country, while
learning a sufficiency of the common language to enable a man to direct
the labourers who will be under him in their field work. And, what is
of equal importance, the intending settler, however great may have been
his experience, should be ready to cast aside prejudice in favour of his
own preconceived opinions, and studiously take note of why this or that
course is followed out by old cultivators; he must learn that amidst a
great deal of chaff that he may cast aside there are many grains of good
sound wheat--otherwise, excellent dearly bought bits of experience.
_Festina lente_ is a grand old Roman proverb, and the newcomer to Egypt
will gain in the end by not being in too great a hurry to start.
Unlike the British farmer, the agriculturist in Egypt has at hand an
abundant supply of labour. Housed in the mud huts or sun-dried brick
houses adjoining the estates, the labourer is at all hours ready to
respond to the demand. He receives one or two acres of land let at a
reduced rental; he is a day labourer only, and can absent himself at
pleasure to attend to his craft. His wage varies from sixpence to
tenpence per day of ten hours in summer and eight hours in winter. He
provides his own food.
In disposition this peasant is contented, good-natured, not resentful,
and of good physique. He is also very untruthful, unreliable at his
work, lazy, cunning, and unconscionable as to the quality and quantity
of the task he is put to--in short, a thorough eye-servant. He requires
constant supervision, when he will do good work under a trying sun. He
promises fair, but performs badly. If he commits a fault and is
questioned as to how it happened, one can invariably depend upon his
telling an untruth. When working on his own plot he is most diligent,
but his methods are not always the best, and he does not get the full
benefit from the soil, owing to want of intelligence as to the rules of
good husbandry. On a large estate, should extra hands be wanted for a
special occasion, a hundred to two hundred men can be had on one night's
notice being given--a delightful state of affairs in cases of emergency,
though here the farmer does not often suffer from his hay or corn crops
being unharvested through the redundance of rain.
A large percentage of the fellaheen are perfectly illiterate, which
accounts for their want of readiness to take up the initiative. They
have no thirst for knowledge and love in agricultural matters to keep
running in the old rut. Exactness, tidiness, and pride in his work are
qualities very rarely found in a fellah. Slovenliness in the
performance of duties is characteristic of the paid day labourer, and to
a lesser degree when working on his own account. In Britain, for
instance, where do we find the breeder of stock who excels his
neighbours except in the shrewd farmer who, at great trouble and study,
and by patient experimenting, attains to success? Not only so, but he
is like the leaven which leaveneth the whole lump by raising the
standard of a district. The apathy of the fellah is shown in the lack
of breeding in horses, cattle, and sheep in Egypt, which is due to want
of selecting suitable sires, care in rearing, and the like.
The soil responds to thorough tillage in a marked degree, but too little
care is bestowed upon this question of cultivation, as the fellah is
prone to scamp his work and leave part of his land solid--that is, not
thoroughly stirred. When exposed to the sun the soil cracks and opens
into fissures, sometimes as wide as five inches. The fellah is often,
too, careless in providing a good bed for the seed, and irregular
germination is the result. If the land is judiciously watered and
timeously ploughed in a friable condition, it can be brought to a fine
tilth without much extra trouble. As it is all soil--nothing in the
shape of a bad subsoil exists, as in some parts of Great Britain--deep
cultivation is thoroughly beneficial, bringing, as it does, unexhausted
soil to the top. Generally in the preparation of the land for the
cotton crop, with its deep-searching roots, a depth of twelve inches is
attained.
Doubtless much of the apathy of the labouring man amongst the fellaheen
is due, as in the case of the rice-feeding Hindoo, to his being to so
great an extent a vegetarian. With him the staff of life consists
principally of an exceedingly hard kind of bread, baked almost to
biscuit, and composed of maize, or dourra, the small-grained millet; and
the result of the fellaheen housewife's efforts in this kind of food
preparation necessitates dipping or soaking in water before the bread
can be partaken of at a meal.
But in such a splendid garden land as Egypt, where cultivated produce
attains maturity at so rapid a rate, and where with careful management
and such a spring and summer-like climate two or even three crops of
vegetables can be obtained in a year, it may easily be supposed that the
peasant can provide himself with a constant supply of green food; and he
certainly takes advantage of his position, indulging freely in the
ordinary vegetables common in the gardens of the West, and supplementing
them with the delicious green maize so popular with the American people.
This latter grain is one of the staple foods, when it has come to
maturity, of the inhabitants of the Delta. It is ground into a coarse
flour, and mingled with a small proportion of barley; while in addition,
to give flavour and a slight stimulus to the digestive organs which are
brought to bear upon one of the hardest grains in assimilation, a small
portion of the peculiar clover-like, many-seeded plant, fenugreek, is
added.
Maize gives place to a great extent in Upper Egypt to millet or dourra
amongst the poorer orders; but the better-class work-people, who earn
much higher wages than the agricultural labourer, are now taking to the
general use of wheaten bread.
Although the ordinary fellah partakes of so simple a diet, and may be
wanting in energy, loving as he does to glide through life in the same
old groove that was formed by his forefathers, he is a well-built,
healthy, muscular individual, and is not to be beaten by any coolie as a
worker under a torrid sun. Much of his work consists of raising water
for irrigation, and if statistics could be produced as to the number of
gallons that he sends trickling amongst the roots of the crop, or
moistening the land previously in their preparation, ordinary figures
would almost fail. Suffice it to say that it is immense. Even now he
clings often of necessity to the old, old shadoof--that which is
represented in the engraving--which, in spite of its Egyptian name, is
only our old friend of the suburban brickfield, a long pole balanced
upon a post in scale beam fashion, with a bucket at one end of the pole,
a weight at the other, equal to that of the water which is raised from
somewhere below for pouring into a receptacle, ready to be dipped again,
perhaps, and sent higher by means of another shadoof farther up.
The worker of this primitive water distributer, in his cotton robe, is
one of the commonest objects seen upon the banks. The photograph well
depicts the sturdy fellah at his task. In addition, there is the
old-world sakieh, a much more complicated affair; for here, in the past,
primitive ingenuity turned its hand to mechanical construction, and
produced after much toil the manual labour-saving and ox- or
buffalo-enlisting water-wheel, working after the fashion of one of our
river dredges, but clumsy of the clumsy, and having, in place of the
metal scoops, so many earthenware pots, held in their places to the
periphery of the water-wheel by as many cords, as will be seen in the
engraving. Still, it is effective in its way, and the yoked oxen which
supply the motive power that turns the heavy wheels raise vast
quantities of water year after year. The sakieh is quaint, old-world,
and picturesque, and it has served its purpose so well, for who can say
how far back in the past, that it never seems to have occurred to the
lower order of Egyptian mind that any improvement could be made. That
has been left to the West, and now that under the present progressive
forward movement of Egyptian agriculture European, and especially
British, water-raising and distributing machines are being utilised, the
fate of the sakieh seems to be that sooner or later it will merely live
to be spoken of as a curiosity, only seen in some artist's
representation of the past.
The fellah's habitation has not varied with the years; as in antiquity,
so now. The primitive clay hut is simplicity itself. As it is figured
in the quaint tomb pictures, so it is to-day in the suburbs and
villages--its furniture a wooden chest or two, its cooking utensils a
few earthen pots. But his hut is principally his sleeping place, for
his life is pretty well passed beneath the broad canopy of heaven. He
rises with the dawn to begin his day's work at the plough, or to handle
his heavy hoe. At another time the demands of the crops for water or
for the mud-laden fertilising contents of the great stream, take him to
the shadoof or to guide the bullock or buffalo turning the water-wheel.
As elsewhere, the fellah's wife is the soul of his humble home. She
toils busily and patiently through the duties of her little domestic
centre, cares for her elders, cooks, and finds time to feed the cattle
and collect the sun-dried fuel from off the parched soil, to come back
marching homeward, strong and statuesque, bearing the piled-up basket
upon her head; while it is she who, while her lord is busily lowering
and raising the shadoof, descends knee deep into the river or canal to
fill the great, heavy, amphora-like earthen pot and then bear it back to
her home, classically picturesque in her drapery as she balances the
clumsy vessel upon shoulder or head, and bears the life-giving fluid
onward with a steady, easy swing. It is she who makes the dourra, or
maize bread, and shapes and stitches the cotton clothing, which is the
only wear of all her circle. Unlike her sister of the city, she does
not shrink so much from the gaze of the other sex, but still to some
extent keeps up the tradition; though wearing no veil she will hold up a
portion of her drapery at the coming of the passer-by, or perhaps only
place her hand before her mouth.
Woman-like, in spite of her menial toil, she believes in personal care,
and her long black hair is carefully dressed and glistens with Palma
Christi oil. She paints, too, as of old, the marks appearing upon her
chin and forehead, while a string of attractive glass beads decorates
and hangs suspended from her neck.
The olden Egyptian costume is that principally affected by the fellah.
It consists of a closely-fitting cap of felt or cotton and a long robe
of the latter material, deeply dyed of an indigo blue. Shirt and
drawers are of the same material, while in some cases a young buck
amongst his people will adorn himself, like Joseph of old, in a vest of
many colours, borrowed from the Arab, the Persian, or the Turk. As
above intimated, the fellah believes in a life of leisure, and finds it
rather difficult to make the first start at his daily toil.
In the olden days the lot of the fellah was not quite so happy as it
might have been. He suffered from enforced labour, and does not seem to
have had much chance of appeal. But he had one notable thing in his
favour, for a river when in flood is subject to having huge portions of
its banks undermined and swept away in a state of muddy solution; and,
as was frequently the case, the peasant cultivator, who for the sake of
the irrigation had his holding as near the bank as he could contrive to
get, was often a great sufferer, being in the possession before the
flood of a considerable strip of cultivated land, while after the
inundation it was a minus quantity, leaving him to begin life again.
Here, however, the law of the land was very equitable upon his behalf,
giving him liberty to go either up or down stream to select an equal
quantity of the land he had lost that was new and unappropriated, and no
one said him nay.
And now, thanks to the just and easy state of the Government, the native
working Egyptian is far better off with regard to his condition than he
appears to have been at any time in the past. Prosperity surrounds him,
and the lesser holders of land, say of from four to ten feddans or
acres, rapidly grow well-to-do and distance the larger proprietors. The
extent now of the land under cultivation is vastly in excess of what it
was. The people are growing more energetic--those of the better class--
and are learning fast, while the spirit of emulation is increasing
amongst them as they waken up to what modern civilisation will achieve.
Their Government, too, is working hard on their behalf, a college having
been established at Ghizeh for the purpose of instructing the sons of
native landowners and of the working fellaheen class in more advanced
agriculture, fitting them in the knowledge necessary for the prosecution
of agriculture according to the best forms, the proper rotations of
crops, selections of fertilisers, natural and chemical, and, above all,
stockbreeding and all that has been learned of late in connection with
the dairy.
In brief, much as has been said of the Egypt of the past being the
garden of the world, it bids fair to become in the future so great a
contrast that old Egypt will pale into insignificance in the bright
light of the new.