Position 36 - An Egyptian Sakieh, Or Ox-driven Bucket Pump, Raising Water For Irrigation

A small proportion of the Egyptian peasants are able to use another device for raising the Nile waters. This machine, known as a “sakieh,” is again familiar to us in a less primitive form, as the bucket- or chain-pump. A wheel which you see out yonder next to the river, as it revolves over the water, carries an endless band of palm rope, which hangs in a loop in the water beneath the wheel. Distributed at intervals along this band are earthen jars, which, as the wheel revolves and the band moves, are carried down into the water, filled and continually raised to the top, where you may see two of them now, just as they are turning over and discharging their contents into a trough concealed behind the masonry.

A black, horned buffalo revolves a rude horizontal wheel, which is geared with the axle of the band wheel, and as the animal walks slowly round, the whole ponderous machine with much creaking and groaning is kept in operation, and a constant stream of water runs out into the network of trenches which distribute the water throughout the fields. The driver is often a child of tender age, and not infrequently in this land of epidemic ophthalmia, we find a blind boy seated on the beam revolving with the machine, and driving the oxen which furnish the power.

Blindness in one eye is often self-inflicted, and old women who understand the use of the noxious herbs which will destroy the eye, are much in demand, for when once the sight of the right eye is gone, the youth escapes military service. How necessary such irrigation is, you may infer from the dried and parched condition of the soil before us, the clods of which are baked to the hardness of sun-dried brick, from which they differ almost only in the matter of form.