OLD FATHER NILE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20454, 4 January 1930, Page 3 (Supplement)

OLD FATHER NILE.

GREAT RIVER IN FLOOD.

HOW HISTORY IS REPEATED

It, was like turning back a chapter of ancient history recently to read a cablegram from Egypt concerning the Nile, says a London writer. The great river was in flood.

The waters on which Egypt depends for life were swirling down from their mountain sources. Every able-bodied Egyptian was holding himself in readiness to combat the attempts of the river to overflow and rend its banks and to pour disaster on the land of its creation.

The scene that was being witnessed in Egypt- has had its likeness, year after year, for perhaps thousands of years. From its distant mountain cradle the Nile courses, charged with silt and soil, to pour out of its bed, and on its journey to the sea it deposits its mineral burden to make the land on each side of if a seedbed, one long oasis stretching through the heart of a desert.

Possibly the Old World civilisation was cradled in the valley of the Nile, in which case this river was its mother. Every human epoch may be traced along its course, from the astounding art, revealed in the tomb of Tutankhamen, the palaces and pyramids of the Pharaohs, back through cultures less advanced and so up the stream of Time until one finds the works,of men who polished flints for tools, and ultimately tho works of .men who used flint tools unpolished and unworked.

Throughout all those thousands of years the Nile has been the source of life, the giver of that unfailing blessing of fertile soil upon which man and animal have de pended. But the great river gave indiscriminately. The landmarks men set up to divide one property from another were obliterated year after year as the swirling waters swept far out beyond their banks. Herodotus states "that geometry was called into being solely. by the need of men to survey quickly and accurately land from which the river had swept all marks of possession. Two astonishing figures came into the story, Ctesibius and Hero, both of Alexandria, and living from one to two hundred years before Christ. Ctesibius was the master, a. great original mind, who invented pumps resembling the pressure pumps used, to-day. Hero was his pupil, and first, applied geometry widely to land survey for the restoration of the Nile boundaries. Hero was that wonder-man who devised the steam turbine for opening and closing tho temple dOors of his native city. Even the work of building the Great Pyramid of Cheops would' have to be suspended when the' Nile began to rage, for unless the banks were kept entire, waters would continue to pour out and the Nile y>-ould bring ruin instead of prosperity to Egypt.