THE NILE IN HARNESS thousand acres. These basins, which are often subdivided, are so connected that the water flows from one to the other until it finally passes out of the lower basin back into the Nile. When the floods come, the lowest basins are filled first and then those higher up, until at last all have become great ponds and Egypt is one vast inland sea cut up by the embankments and islands upon which the villages stand.

There are many such systems of basins in Upper Egypt, some large and some small. There are also basins higher up and closer to the river which are filled with sakiehs or shadoofs. When 1 tell you that the fall of this valley from here to Cairo is only seven inches to the mile you will see how carefully these basins must be graduated in order to take advantage of the flow of the river. They have to be so constructed that the water can be drained off as rapidly as it is let on. As I have already said, the Abyssinian mud contains a great quantity of salts, and it is just as bad to have too much of it as too little. If the land is over¬ watered the salts dissolve from the soil, the over-soaked land becomes wormy, and the crops are often sown too late. The red water, or that containing the silt, is allowed to stand just about forty days. During this time it drops a great deal of sediment and furnishes enough moisture for the crops.

But the Aswan Dam has so regulated the river flow that the Egyptian farmer is far less at the mercy of low Niles or high Niles than in the past. The dam is one of the wonders of modern Egypt. It is in full sight of me as I sit here on the left bank of the Nile, with the desert at my back. It looks like a great stone viaduct crossing the rocky bed of the river, joining the stony hills which wall 13i