In dealing with the history of the Barrage I have somewhat anticipated the order of events. It was the prospect of the coming Reservoir and an increased water-supply in summer that urged on the engineers to make assurance doubly sure by placing the strength of that structure beyond all doubt. It is time to pass from the Delta to Assouan. No country in the world tells its story more readily to the traveller than Upper Egypt. As he passes up the broad waterway of the Nile, he may survey the whole life of the land without stirring from the deck of his steamer. If he has been in Egypt before, he cannot fail to be struck by the growth of its prosperity; it forces itself upon him in the bearing of the people, and in the number of their flocks and herds, now as ever the outward and visible sign of material well-being. Even the squalid clusters of mud huts, often roofless, or covered only by a few loose canes, dirty and miserable as they seem to Western eyes, with nothing substantial among them except the tomb of some sheikh or the inevitable pigeon-houses, are only proofs of the genial climate, which makes a roof overhead, and clothing as well, among the least of the necessities of life. The people themselves, hard workers as they are, have a happy and prosperous aspect, and the crowds of naked children, brown as the waters by whose edge they play, look as cheerful and contented as the vast colonies of pigeons, which live under very similar conditions to their owners. On each side of the river-valley, here and there, especially on the eastern side, coming right to the water’s edge, rise the hills of the desert. Where the domain of the water ceases a man may stand with one foot in the bare and barren sand and the other in the most fertile soil in the world. Everywhere along the bank, hour after hour, day after day, the traveller may see the peasants lifting the water with the primitive shadoofs, tier upon tier, up to the level of the fields, or the oxen turning the sakieh. A hundred times a day he will have borne in upon him the fact that all he sees, from the kid upon the dykes to those obelisks of modern Egypt, the tall chimneys of the sugar factories, owes its existence absolutely to the water. Close behind the teeming villages and the luxuriant crops, the palm-trees and the acacias, the sugar-canes and the maize-fields, rise the gaunt limestone rocks and the sandy desert, fit emblems of the famine that is ever ready to swoop down should the water fail.