Egypt and the Sudan 337

interests involved and official sympathy. Whereas the
utilisation of the White Nile will be a very costly under-
taking, involving, as it will, the cutting of the sudd and
the canalising of the water through the Bahr-el-Ghazal
swamps, which is estimated at no less than £20,000,000.
Once this has been done a dam at Lake Albert raising
the lake level by twenty-five feet would store forty
million cubic metres of water, while the drainage of the
swamps would save a vast loss of water by evaporation
and bring a vast territory under cultivation. But, obvi-
ously, operations on this scale are both technically and
financially quite beyond the power of Egypt, even if it
were given sole control of the White Nile waterways and
the Lake Albert outfall. Yet Egypt's need for this water
is rapidly becoming urgent. Meantime the present pro-
visional arrangements for complicated compensations as
between the water taken by Sudan and that to which
Egypt is entitled get more and more unworkable and more
and more unwelcome to both countries.

It is to be hoped that it will soon be realised that the
interests of the Empire in developing the White Nile are
only second to those of Egypt. It is not only a case of
adding to the Sudan immense areas of productive soil that
are now pestiferous swamps. Every Lancashire cotton
broker knows the effect of a low Nile on British textile
exports and on the employment of British workers. Every
London Covent Garden wholesaler knows the effect of a
low Nile on the price of onions, the poor man's beefsteak.
If British capital has so far been more concerned with
developing the Sudan it is, we may suppose, only because
of the continuance of uncertain conditions in relations
between the Empire and Egypt,

The reader has now been railroaded in this chapter
through the dreary wastes of a Blue Book Nile and the

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