It Is Useless To Enumerate
The Varieties Of Fruits That Are Brought To Market; All Are Inferior,
Excepting Grapes And Lemons.
The productions of the gardens exhibit the
miserable position of the island, which emanates from a want of
elasticity in a debased and oppressed population too apathetic and
hopeless to attempt improvements.
England can change this wretched stagnation by the application of
capital, and by encouraging the development of the first necessity,
WATER; without which, all attempts at agricultural improvements, and the
extension of tree-planting in the low country, would be futile. I shall
therefore devote the following chapter to the subject of artificial
irrigation, and its results.
CHAPTER XIV.
REMARKS ON IRRIGATION.
The ancient prosperity of Cyprus must have been due to artificial
irrigation, which ensured a maximum of production, similar to the
inundated lands of Egypt. In the latter country the Nile is a "Salvator
Mundi," without which Egypt would be a simple prolongation of the Nubian
and Libyan deserts, in the absence of a seasonable rainfall. The
difference between the great cereal-producing portion of Cyprus and the
Delta of Egypt is, that, although the plain of Messaria has been formed
chiefly through the action of the Pedias river and other periodical
mountain streams, which have deposited a rich stratum of soil during
inundations, the rivers are merely torrents, or simple conduits, which
carry off the waters of heavy storms, or intervals of rain, and act as
drains in conveying the surplus waters during floods; while at other
times they are absolutely dry.
If the Nile were controlled by a series of weirs or dams, with sluices
to divert the high waters of the period into natural depressions within
the desert, to form reservoirs at high levels for the supply of Egypt in
seasons of scarcity, the command of the water-supply would be far
preferable to the chances of rain in the most favoured country. Water,
like fire, should be the slave of man, to whom it is the first
necessity; therefore his first effort in his struggle with the elements
should reduce this power to vassalage. There must be no question of
supremacy; water must serve mankind.
Many years ago I published, in the Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, my
ideas for the control of the Nile and the submersion of the cataracts by
a series of weirs, with water-gates for the facility of navigation;
which with certain modifications will some day assuredly be carried out,
and will render Egypt the most favoured country of the world, as
absolute mistress of the river which is now at the same time a tyrant
and a slave. The Pedias of Cyprus may during some terrific rainfall
assume proportions that would convey a most erroneous impression to the
mind of a stranger, who, upon regarding the boiling torrent
overspreading a valley of some miles in width in its impetuous course
towards ancient Salamis, might conclude that it was a river of the first
importance. The fact is that no RIVER exists in Cyprus:
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