RAISING WATER

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 16

RAISING WATER

SOME QUEER METHODS IN

EGYPT.

At the edge of the wide,fields is a small unsown patch of bare earth, shaded from the sun by a vine trellised on rough stakes. In the shade below an ox, blindfolded by a piece of sacking tied over horns and eyes, plods his weary circle, round and round, turning a creaking water-wheel. This is the sakkieh, most indispensable of Egypt's agricultural implements, declares "A Briton in Egypt," in the "Daily .Mail." As the horizontal wheel turns, its wooden teeth catch the serrated rim of a second wheel, *et vertically, and to the round of the latter are lashed earthenware jars which scpop up water from the canal below and pouv it, into a mud channel, whence it is distributed over the crop. The strident creak of the grinding wood, with its ceaseless call of "Ka-00-00-ah," is the only sound that echoes over the fields during Egypt's hot afternoons. If the grating noise ceases for a moment, the sudden eilence wakes the ox's sleeping master to goad him once more on his round. In Egypt no water descending" from mountain recesses aids the work of tillage as it finds its own level. All must be raised from the deep channel of the Nile,- and the appliances used, ef-7 fective as they are, remain probably the most primitive in the world. Most common after the sakkieh, which is the aristocrat of its kind, comes the; shaduf. It is merely a rough-hewn branch, balanced between twin pillars of earth. At one end it is weighted by an adhesive lump of Heavy mud, while from the other is suspended a email basket of goatskin. While the more lordly possessor of a sakkieh makes his ox sweat in his stead, the shaduf must be worked by human labour. Its owner must bend to haul down the goatslrin basket to the water and straighten himself to empty its contents, once the weighted branch has raised it to the higher level. AHEgypt is a silver streaked network of waterways and water-raising instruments. The big canals act as aqueducts from the Nile. Smaller canals, creeping here and there like the tricks of snails, spread the meshes of water further afield. Finally, sakkiehs and ehadufs, with a host of smaller but equally primitive devices, raise the water to the shallow trenches in the fields.