It is difficult to conceive anything more humiliating and exasperating than the position of the French engineers who acted as advisers to the Egyptian Government. Time has vindicated their reputation, and proved the excellence of their designs and the soundness of their work; but in their own day they had to suffer disappointment, and even disgrace, and to bear the brunt of failure, due not to themselves, but to the conditions under which they lived. With no authority to enforce the execution of their plans, hampered at every turn, sometimes by the incompetence, and always by the unwillingness, of the Arab engineers through whom they had to work, supported only occasionally by the uncertain breeze of viceregal caprice, they struggled bravely on, and deserve the greatest credit for what they did manage to accomplish. In 1853 Abbas Pasha, the then Viceroy, dismissed Mougel from his service, to mark his displeasure at the slowness of the building, and appointed a new man. Little was gained by the change. The Barrages were nominally finished in 1863, and an attempt was made to close the gates on the Rosetta branch. But a settlement took place, and they had to be immediately reopened. Not till 1872 was the Barrage really used, and then only partially on the Rosetta branch, and not at all on the Damietta. Still, whereas before 1872 only 250,000 acres of summer crops had been matured in the Delta, and that at the cost of enormous labour in clearing the canals, afterwards the total was 600,000 acres, and the cost of maintenance was very much less. The ordinary summer supply available for the Delta canals was increased from 64 cubic metres per second to 150. This success brought home to the mind of the then reigning Khedive, Ismail, the advantages of perennial irrigation and the cultivation of cotton, and he determined to extend the system to Upper Egypt and the Fayoum, where he possessed huge estates, amassed by fair means and foul through the agency of the notorious Mufettish, Said. Accordingly, in 1873 the great Ibrahimiyah Canal was dug. Starting from near Assiout, it runs for 268 kilometres nearly parallel to the Nile on its left bank, and supplies perennial irrigation to 252,000 acres in the provinces of Assiout, Minia, and Beni-Suêf. It also carries flood-water to a series of basins lying to the west of it, nearer the desert. Before 1873 the Bahr Yusuf, which feeds the Fayoum, took its water direct from the Nile, but its head was now transferred to the left bank of the Ibrahimiyah Canal at Dêrut, and 327,000 acres in the Fayoum came nominally under perennial irrigation.