CAIRO TO KISUMU are always too many would-be farmers for the watered area. At the present rate of growth, it is estimated, the population will have increased by the middle of the century to twenty millions of people, practically all of them de¬ pendent on agriculture, and so on this one river system. The government has yet more ambitious schemes for hoarding and meting out its precious waters.

At Wady Haifa, about two hundred miles up the river from Aswan, begins the Sudan, which extends for thou¬ sands of miles southward. In controlling this vast terri¬ tory, Great Britain has hold also of the upper reaches of the Nile from the south boundary of Egypt proper into the Great Lakes of Central Africa where the river has its source. The irrigation works, new dams, and reservoirs planned or building on the Upper Nile are intended to in¬ crease the arable lands not only in the Sudan but in Egypt as well. The projects which the British have for the im¬ provement of the Nile will rank as the most daring of the engineering plans of the century. To carry them out will cost as much as the Suez Canal, but they will build up fifteen hundred or two thousand miles south of the Medi¬ terranean Sea, several other Egypts twice or thrice as rich as the lower Nile valley, each supporting its millions of people.

The projects include schemes for the regulation of the Great Lakes on the highlands of Central Africa, to make them serve as reservoirs for the Nile. They include, also, plans for the embankment of the tributaries of the White Nile flowing through the great swamps on the northern slope of the Congo watershed, and the digging of over two hundred miles of new channel, whereby the main stream of the White Nile will be greatly shortened and its bed 136