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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt:... VIII. WATER. THE FIELDS OF EGYPT--WHAT THE NILE IS TO EGYPT--THE BARRAGE--THE CULTIVATION OF LOWER EGYPT--HISTORY OF THE BARRAGE--THE RESERVOIR AT ASSOUAN. December 31.--Br-r-r-r! This the land of sunshine! As the omnibus train jolted out of Cairo I shivered in my long overcoat. The other passengers in the long, second-class carriage--it was a Government carriage, and it was like a rejected cattle-van fitted up with worn-out seats from a third-rate village ale-house--were shivering worse than I. Is not this the coldest Egyptian winter within the memory of man? Sitting on the little platform outside the carriage was a blackveiled woman, with a child arrayed like a rainbow; propriety would not allow that she A PICTURESQUE LANDSCAPE. 95 came inside with the men, and how she shivered I should not like to think. From time to time there passed along the train a shaggy Arab selling bread. The train limped rheumatically at about a couple of miles an hour through the fields of Egypt. Nobody could call Egypt a beautiful country, but nobody could deny that it is a picturesque one. Under the steely clouds green and brown fields stretched out on either hand. They were all split up into tiny squares by tiny embankments and tiny ditches now dry; tinier ditches still ran along each furrow. Here and there was a native hoeing or pulling turnips or washing them; here and there a little blindfolded fawn cow was treadmilling round a creaking water-wheel, raising water by an endless chain of earthen buckets, all leaking more or less--some with holes through their bottoms. Presently you would pass a group of palms encircling white, low houses, with what looked like a thatch that had been put on with a pitchfork, but was really the inhabitants' store of dry...