complimented an official on the Nile bank, whose activity was quite disproportionate to his apparent age. He told me that he was a comparatively young man, but he had had charge of the Nile bank at Mit Badr when the great breach occurred in 1878, and that Ismail Pasha had telegraphed orders to throw him and the engineer into the breach. He was given 12 hours’ grace by the local chief, and during that interval his hair had become white; subsequently he was pardoned. These were the senseless orders which used to petrify officials into stupidity. The following estimate was made by me of the cost of protecting the Delta proper between the two branches of the Nile during the high flood of 1887:-- Cost of protection for 432 kilometres of bank or 1,200,000 acres of cultivation:-- {Sand bags 60,000 @ £ ·03 = £ 1,800 _Materials_ {Stone 5,000 @ „ ·50 = „ 2,500 _paid for_ {Stakes 55,000 @ „ ·06 = „ 3,300 -------- £ 7,600 ======== {Camel loads of stalk for 42 kilometres, _Materials_ { 14,000 @ £ ·15 = £ 2,100 _not paid for_ { -------- Total materials £ 9,700 ======== 15 engineers @ £80 = £ 1,200 Unpaid corvee, 1,374,079 men @ £ ·03 = „ 41,222 ======== Total labour £ 42,422 ======== Total materials and labour £ 52,122 This works out to £120 per kilometre of bank, or £·045 per acre of land protected. It is a very cheap insurance. CHAPTER IV. Projects. 31. =Projects.=--No account of the Nile in 1904 would be complete without an enumeration and slight examination of the projects before the public for the provision of sufficient water to the Nile in times of low supply to insure the perennial irrigation of the whole of Egypt; to utilise these perennial waters by converting basin tracts into perennially irrigated ones; to protect the country from the dangers accompanying high floods; and to permit of the reclamation of the low salted lands of Lower Egypt which border the Mediterranean sea.