COMING TO EGYPT

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 134, 3 December 1935, Page 6

COMING TO EGYPT

GREAT IRRIGATION

PLAN

WORK UNDER WAY

Deep in the African desert—lßoo miles.from the gardens and domes of Cairo—the second link in the world's greatest irrigation project is now under way, says the "Christian Science Monitor." Huge derricks'/rise above the flat horizon bearing tons of stone. Locomotives send black smoke against the ever-blue sky. And with their heads bound up against the sun.in dirty, white turbans,.or shaded by cork helmets, 800b Arabs mould into a single five-mile barrier the. strategicunits of a dam which, by 1937, will hold 2,500,000,000 cubic meters of Nile water and play a major part, in transforming the ancient land of the Pharaohs into, the garden paradise of ail Africa. ■ . ■•• " . . .-. ' I

It is appropriate that the world's most ancient civilisation should be engaged- in history's greatest programme for irrigation. Egypt has always lived from the Nile waters. Her pyramids, libraries, and engineering feats wet» as much a product of intelligent ■ utilisation of the great river as were.ths grains that fed her millions of peopls. Dykes and levees were devised to salvage the Nile's precious annual waste, and canals and "lifts," operated by buliocks, camels, and even man-power, conveyed it to areas higher than the Nile's level. And only after these anr nual flood waters had soakeo. deeply into the soil were they turned back into the river channel and given to the sea. • • ■ TIMES OF FAMINE. Out where the Abyssinian rain had ceased and the Nile ran low, and sometimes dry,' between January and October no further crops could be cultivated.^: Thus resulted the great granaries and storehouses, and the famines that .decimated the people even in spite of themr ''..;. Not until the middle of the past cehr tury, of Mohammed Ali, was perennial cultivation of the Nile Delta conceived and executed..', The first of Mohammed Ali's projects, the Delta Barrage, was undertaken by him with the definite object of making the cotton grow there the year round. He had introduced cotton into Egypt and wanted it to prosper. He completed the Delta Barrage in 1890, and it not only successfully held the Nile surplus during November, December, and January biit'; raised the water level to such a'height that it could be served to the Delta lands.by canal during the succeeding] months, when the Nile itself .was entirely dried up. The Barrage held water enough,' even, to irrigate, the Delta lands until the beginning of the next flood. ■;'. ■[ . The-Asyut Barrage, designed to store up water for the,provinces immediate^ ly. south of Cairo, was the next to be built; and it was finished in 1902, simultaneously with, "the great Assuan Dam, still further south, and the first major link in Egypt's plan to control the entire Nile system. The first heightening of the Assuan Dam, 1907----12, was contemporary, with the construction of the Esna ; Barrage. which furnished flood .irrigation ,to the provihee of Quena. ' OTHER WORKS. And following these projects were the second heightening of the Assuan Dam by an*international-committee of engineers, 1927-33; the' building: of the Nag-Hamadi Barrage between Esna and Asyut Barrages; the erection of twelve electric pumping stations,to lift water for the irrigation of some -50,000 feddans of high-level land in Assuan province; the construction of: seventeen electric drainage stations to drain 1,000,000 feddans of low land bordering the lakes in the Nile delta, where the finest cotton is produced; the building of the great Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile ;to open up the Gezira—a huge area between the Blue Nile aVid White Nite—to cotton cultivation; and several subsidiary works connected with the remodelling of existing canals and drains in order to make them capable of dealing with the tremendous volume, of extra water. The. White Nile floods in October, whereas the .Blue Nile floods in August and September. The Blue Nile contributes more water to the main-stream-during comparative flood seasons, sending down volumes calculated at Khartoum at 5700 feet per second, only 10 per cent, less than that of Niagara River, as compared with 1400 cubic metres per second for the Whit-2 Nile; but after the flood season is over —long after the. rains have ceased'in the Abyssinian '■ highlands—the ."White Nile continues to supply 82 per cent, of the total water going to Egypt. Even in April it sends down 540 cubic feet per second, as compared with the 120 cubic feet per second discharged by the Blue Nile in April.