To my way of thinking, the most interesting chapter in the history of present-day Egypt is that which records the development of scientific irrigation. Northeast Africa being practically rainless, its sole source of water supply is the Nile, this mighty river created by torrential rains in the mountains of Abyssinia and by the overflow of equatorial lakes, and which is without tributaries in Egypt proper, having an overflow which varies with the seasons. For four months the flood rushing seaward, which is known as “high Nile,” enriches hundreds of square miles of what would otherwise be arid and worthless land. Then come eight months of low Nile, which, were it not for the genius of an English engineer, would mean unwatered fields, scanty crops, and probably famine. The British administrators, appreciating from the very outset that Egypt's entire future depended upon its agricultural prosperity, and that this, in turn, depended upon the _fellaheen_ having an ample and steady supply of water for their farms, set their engineers at the task of devising some scheme for compelling the great river to pay tribute to the land through which it passed instead of wasting its fertilising waters in the Mediterranean. Hence the great barrage at Assuan, suggested by Sir William Willcocks, designed by Sir Benjamin Baker, built by Sir John Aird, and financed by Sir Ernest Cassel. A mile and a quarter long, containing a million tons of stone and creating a reservoir three times the area of the Lake of Geneva, this titanic barrier permits the additional irrigation of one million six hundred thousand acres of land. Though its cost was twelve million five hundred thousand dollars, it has already increased the earning power of Egypt fully thirteen million dollars annually, so it will be seen that it more than pays for itself to the country every twelvemonth. The systematic liberation, during the burning summer months, of the water thus conserved, means unfailing prosperity for Egypt, for it is almost unbelievable, to one who has not seen it with his own eyes, what agricultural magic water can work in this naturally fertile soil. As the regions capable of responding to irrigation are almost boundless, and as the water supply is almost inexhaustible, and as the engineers—and, what is far more important, the financiers—have come to appreciate that the pregnant soil can be made to pay for the cost of any reservoir, or series of reservoirs, which they may construct, it is only reasonable to assume that the great dam at Assuan is but the forerunner of many others, so that eventually the Valley of the Nile will be white with cotton and yellow with grain from the Delta to the Sudd.