FELLAHEEN ON THEIR FARMS
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.
[Illustration: The primitive _norag_ is still seen in Egypt threshing
the grain and cutting up the straw for fodder. It moves on small iron
wheels or thin circular plates and is drawn in a circle over the wheat or
barley.]
[Illustration: The Egyptian agricultural year has three seasons. Cereal
crops are sown in November and harvested in May; the summer crops are
cotton, sugar, and rice; the fall crops, sown in July, are corn, millet,
and vegetables.]
[Illustration: The mud of the annual inundations is no longer sufficient
fertilizer for the Nile farm. The _fellaheen_ often use pigeon manure on
their lands and there are hundreds of pigeon towers above the peasants’
mud huts.]
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.
[Illustration: AFRICA
Last of the continents to be conquered by the explorers, and last to be
divided up among the land-hungry powers, is now slowly yielding to the
white man’s civilization.]
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.
[Illustration: Next to the market where sugar cane is sold is the “Superb
Mosque,” built by Sultan Hassan nearly 600 years ago. Besides being a
centre for religious activities, it is also a gathering place for popular
demonstrations and political agitation.]
[Illustration: Cairo is the largest city on the African continent, and
one of the capitals of the Mohammedan world. Its flat-roofed buildings
are a yellowish-white, with the towers and domes of hundreds of mosques
rising above them.]
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.