to cut a new canal for the White Nile from
Bor to Taufikia, a distance of about two hundred miles, which will avoid the marshes altogether, save enormous quantities of water, and cost about five and a half millions. This fascinating scheme has been considered sufficiently feasible to justify the setting aside of a large sum for a scientific survey of the levels. It is pro- posed also to raise the level of the Assuan dam at a cost of half a million, to perfect the irrigation system in Middle Egypt, and to benefit the Sudan by the construction of irrigation works on the Blue Nile. We recommend all who have any imagination to read Lord Cromer's masterly covering despatch, in which he draws a picture of what Egypt and the Sudan will be when the water difficulty is finally solved,—" a monument that will probably endure long after all evidence of those erected by an earlier civilisation shall have passed away." The cost of the total scheme is placed at £E21,400,000, but there is no intention of carrying it all out at once. The first thing is to raise the Assuan dam—the benefits derived from this will be immediate—and next comes the completion of the Suakim- Berber Railway. Fifteen years is about the time required to finish all the works now suggested.
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