Subtitled "A Narrow Green Strip of Fertility Stretching for a Thousand Miles Through Walls of Desert”
The peasant population huddle in villages within the confines of four mud walls, homes which literally do not furnish them with a roof over their heads- wretched cabins improvised out of Nile mud, windowless as well as roofless. No modern pots and pans, none of the contrivances and shifts of modern times that go toward rendering life easy and comfortable, and which enable the foreman of a section gang on an American railroad to be better lodged, warmed, lighted, and served with news than was Queen Elizabeth of England.
We are accustomed to think of Egypt in terms of symbols-the Sphinx, Osiris, the Pyramids. The country has been a happy hunting ground for the archeologists, and their revelations turn us back through the abysms of time to the contemplation of mysterious figures of the past, whether a sacred bull or King Tutankhamen.
A country of wonders, no doubt; but to the writer's mind the wonder of wonders is not the ancient relics dug from the earth, nor the mighty works of men's hands erected upon its surface, but the soil itself-that longish strip of green fringing the River Nile for the better part of one thousand miles.
Let us, therefore, begin our narrative, after a manner of speaking, from the ground up. Nature has dealt in niggardly fashion with the land of Egypt. The country possesses no copper, no iron ore, no forests, no precious minerals, and no good steam coal. It is fairly exact to remark that the country lacks all the prime prerequisites of modern industrialism. Agriculture is virtually the sole source of national wealth. But even in this field the country is extremely limited.
Egypt is practically rainless and only one-twenty-fifth of the land is capable of cultivation. These fertile regions are sandwiched in between the Arabian and Libyan deserts. While the area of Egypt, not including the Sudan, is 350,000 square miles, or about eight times the size of the State of Pennsylvania, only a little more than 12,000 square miles are capable of cultivation.
Over this relatively small strip of habitable land the population swarms some 1,100 to the square mile, whereas the population of Belgium, the densest in Europe, is 652 to the square mile. Yet, despite all this, Egypt is probably the most perfect and extensive farming laboratory that the world has yet seen.
From an agricultural standpoint, the country presents a spectacle of three uniformities-climate, soil, moisture. Except for the region near the north coast, the country is rainless and frosts are unknown. The soil is the same, formed by the sediment from Nile water.
Now, uniformity is precisely the thing which the American farmer lacks. The main factor in crop yields is the weather, and the weather is always x, the unknown quantity. The Egyptian solves his farming equation by knowing the value of x before he starts.
With the American farmer, agriculture is more or less of a gamble with Nature…"
7” x 10”, 28 pages, 29 B&W photos
These are pages from an actual 1926 magazine.
26C2
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Luke 12: 15
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