CAIRO TO KISUMU raised on the islands off the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. The Sea Island cotton has a rather longer fibre than the Egyptian. The latter is usually brown in colour and is noted for its silkiness, which makes it valuable for manufacturing mercerized goods. We import an enor¬ mous quantity of it to mix with our cotton, and we have used the Egyptian seed to develop a species known as American-Egyptian, which possesses the virtues of both kinds.

There is a great difference in the varieties raised, ac¬ cording to the part of the Nile valley from which each kind comes. The best cotton grows in the delta, which produces more than four fifths of the output.

A trip through the Nile cotton fields is an interesting one. The scenes there are not in the least like those of our Southern states. Much of the crop is raised on small farms and every field is marked out with little canals into which the water is introduced from time to time. There are no great farm houses in the landscape and no barns. The people live in mud villages from which they go out to work in the fields. They use odd animals for ploughing and harrowing and the crop is handled in a different way from ours.

Let me give you a few of the pictures I have seen while travelling through the country. Take a look over the delta. It is a wide expanse of green, spotted here and there with white patches. The green consists of alfalfa, Indian corn, or beans. The white is cotton, stretching out before me as far as my eye can follow it.

Here is a field where the lint has been gathered. The earth is black, with windrows of dry stalks running across it. Every stalk has been pulled out by the roots and piled 16