the Delta to the First Cataract: the gun has fired at Cairo; and voice after voice tells the fact beyond the range of its boom. The Nile has stopped rising. Will it not go on again? No: by sunset it has begun to subside. It is by hair’sbreadths at first; and for some time the people have to take the fact upon trust; for there is nothing left for them to measure inches by. After a while, however, somebody points out an emerging line of dyke or edge of rock at the base of the mountains. Then palm-tree tops wave over the water, instead of swaying about in it. The grades of the nearest pyramid reappear. The main divisions of the district become distinguishable, and people begin to see exactly where they are. All is dreary, beyond words to express: everything in ruins and swamped. So it was in ancient days of excessive inundation; and so it is now. Instead of Coptic monks looking abroad from their steep, as for fifteen centuries past, there were priests of Ammon and priestesses of Isis stationed on the pylons of the temples: but the waters were from the same everlasting source, and the devastation produced the same misery.
It is so this year. When the height of the Nile is given as above 24 cubits, we must suppose that some people are talking of one kind of cubit, and some of another. The Jews had one cubit of 18 inches, and another of 21 inches: and the cubit of the Nilometer is 19½ inches. It is by this last measure that 19 cubits are found to be equivalent to famine; so that we must suppose the estimate of 24½ this year to mean something else. The destruction, though not total, is very severe. Fifty villages, we are told, have disappeared; and palaces of princes have melted down like huts of mud. Before the highest point was reached, one-third of each crop was given up,—grain, pulse, cucumbers, cotton,—everything the soil produces. As for the live stock, the question is whether any remains. It is only lately that beef has been procurable in Egypt, since the murrain of 1837, after which the killing of cattle of any age was forbidden by government till the valley should be replenished with kine. But sheep were then to be had. At any settlement on the river, a sheep in its fleece was to be had for six shillings; and the fowls and eggs were innumerable. It is to be feared that these are nearly all gone. The sorest lamentation is probably about the cotton crop, which promised new wealth to the peasants this year, but which is said to be to a great extent destroyed. For many dreary months to come, the people must see before them only the dirty ooze where the green crops should be springing. Every other year, they have been going forth by this time to cast their seed upon the waters,—upon the last vanishing film of them,—sure of finding bread there after many days. In a few hours the early blade should be visible; in a few days every embankment and every enclosure should be green. This year it will be only the lines of the recent desert that will be green: and all lower soil will be stagnant water till it must become a baked desert in its turn. The water-wheels and sakias must be swept away in great numbers, as the dykes and sluices are. The novelty on this occasion is the railway. The “silent highway” has risen up against the noisy one. Old Nile has not only put out the engine fires, but carried off the rails. The telegraph posts are down, and the wires broken; and altogether the scene must hint a doubt whether the spirit of old Egypt has not come up against our century, and resolved to swamp innovation altogether. It is certain that when the people were most confidently looking for fat kine, as lean ones as ever were seen have come up out of the river.
This is not the only untoward Egyptian deluge of the year. Some years ago there was a gush and spread of speculation in that region which was promised to render it fruitful in wealth beyond all precedent. When the isthmus of Suez was cut through, and a sea-passage all the way to India was opened, half the commerce of the world would pass through the gates of Egypt; the tolls would be the fortune of any country that had them: and the whole eastern portion of the Nile valley to far above the Delta would be as populous and prosperous as any part of ancient Egypt ever was.
Under the stimulus of such promises, the ruler of Egypt became deeply involved in the Suez Canal scheme: and he supposed himself warranted by his prospects in spending largely on his army and its manœuvres. The Suez canal is not paying; and the world is coming round to the English opinion that it never will pay. The difficulties are rising up before the eyes of the involved parties, as they rose up before other people’s eyes to prevent their involving themselves; and now the Pasha, standing on the high ground near Suez, overlooking the course of the unfinished canal of ancient days, may well wonder how he ever could believe that a trustworthy ship-channel, fit for the passage of a world’s commerce, could be carried through those sands, and out beyond the miles of shallows at the head of the Red Sea. Far away there lies the Indian packet, at the nearest point of approach. Will he ever see great ships pass through either the Mediterranean shallows, or these, or the intervening sands? And, if not, his fortunes are wrecked. He suspects perhaps that the old “ship of the desert” will not yet be driven from its home and function. The steam-horse has partly displaced the camel; but that merchant-ships will maybe believed when it is seen. The Pasha perhaps has but a dim notion of what merchant-ships may come to be, and has supposed them all to be such vessels as could pass the Suez Canal. The necessity of transshipment may have been disclosed to him;—the necessity which would be fatal to a scheme otherwise practicable, as it renders the passage by the Cape the more profitable of the two. However this may be, the cold waters of discouragement have risen in the Pasha’s mind, and are still rising so as to have chilled his very heart. Poverty has overtaken him as a flood: he does not know which way to turn himself for help. Like a sensible man, he is retrenching in his personal and court expenses: but he has buried vast sums in the sands and mud of French speculation; and he may well doubt whether there will be any resurrection. His money has produced a crop of French settlements within
