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It is true that all the arable land was not in the valley. But a complicated system of small canals and well-sweeps carried water from the river-level to the top of the highest banks and an even more intricate system of irrigation trenches spread it throughout the land.
Describing a wide curve, and then across several long snow-beds, we at last reached the river-level, and pitched our tents on snow at an elevation of 16,900 feet. There was no wood; no yak or pony dung, no lichens, no moss, and therefore nothing with which we could make a fire. My men believed that eating cold food at high elevations, when the temperature was low, led to certain death.
Down to the river-level again, where a squalid anchorite, seated at the mouth of a cave dug in the bank, begged of them, and the bell of a monastery on the farther bank tolled slumberously the hour of Nones. And still he said nothing, and she, cowed by his mysterious gaiety, yet spurning herself for her cowardice, was silent also. He hoped to arrive at Angers before nightfall.
Out of the east came a soft summer breeze, stealing silently across the valley, and tilting the balance of each dripping leaf. So the great drops of moisture slipped off them to swell the river, and the drying of the earth commenced. That is what brought them all out together. The water-rat came from a hole five feet above the river-level. An overhanging grass-tuft masked her exit.
Owl Creek flows nearly parallel to Lick Creek, at a distance from it varying from three to five miles, and empties into Snake Creek something more than a mile from its mouth. The land enclosed between these creeks and the river is a rolling plateau from eighty to a hundred feet above the river-level.
The drainage is not usually deeper than four feet, and in places the water-level was but three feet below the surface. The newly reclaimed land being very light, suffers from the dry season, and is often irrigated, which, as it lies below the river-level, can be quickly and cheaply done. Sherman Island was one of the earliest to be reclaimed, and there I visited the fine farm of Mr.
This deluge is supposed to have affected the whole Crati valley, submerging towns and villages. In proof, they say that if you dig near Tarsia below the present river-level, you will pass through beds of silt and ooze to traces of old walls and cultivated land.
As the river falls the basin can no longer be fed by the river, so a second "shadūf" is erected in order to keep the first supplied, and in low Nile it is quite a common sight to see four of these "shadūfs," one above the other, employed in raising the water from the river-level to the high bank above.
Still, here was Bedr, looking like a fat fly who had deliberately come to pay a call on the lean and hungry spider. I was impatient for the moment when the need for genuine gratitude and "faked" explanations was over, and Major Ireton had gone about other business. Then I could follow the Hadji and the Armenian, who had mounted the steps leading up from river-level to the town.
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