Gods, Men & the River

The scene could have been played in Dante's nethermost pit. The sun--or perhaps it was the moon--whirled like a ball of molten lead above a bil lowing grey dust cloud that made any hour seem torrid twilight. An ear-numbing cacophony of whines, snarls, splashes, roars and curses engulfed the 35,000 laborers who went about their tasks.

Huge chunks of granite, some weighing as much as 15 tons, toppled in a steady, clattering stream into the greasy green water below the crude escarpment. Three red-painted vibrators, as tall as ten-story buildings, sent their yards-long steel fingers combing through sand that gushed from giant tubes. Then, suddenly, there was silence. High on a granite crag overlooking the scene, two men pressed two tiny buttons. A muffled explosion sent rock whirling into the sky, and as the smoke cleared the River Nile changed its course for the first time under the hand of man.

Thus last week Gamal Abdel Nasser and Nikita Khrushchev, accompanied at the console by the Presidents of Iraq and Yemen, formally completed the first stage of the Aswan Dam project. After 1,550 days of work, the laborers had finished piling up enough rock for the cofferdam to stem the river; the explosion set off by Nasser and his visitors opened up a diversion channel through which the Nile will now flow until the High Dam itself is completed. As the white-crested Nile rushed into the new channel, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko muttered in an unwontedly poetic mood: "It's like white horses." Even Khrushchev took time out from his attacks on the Western imperialists and said in awe: "This river is alive." As fire works exploded all around, the Arab crowds shouted: "Allah akhbar [God is great]."

It was the greatest construction project in the history of Egypt--a nation whose ancient pyramid builders had given the art of grand construction to the world. But the Great Pyramid of Khufu* at Giza was dedicated to the sterile memory of a dead man. As Khrushchev said as he rubbernecked through Cairo last week: "Artistic standards are higher now." So are pragmatic goals.

Green Acres. First planned by the U.S., until John Foster Dulles withdrew American aid, the project is being built largely by Russian engineers and money. When the $1 billion dam is completed in 1970, a 300-mile-long reservoir--dubbed Lake Nasser, of course --will add 2,000,000 green acres to Egypt's narrow thread of 6,000,000 acres of arable land. In a nation only a third larger than Texas and quite a bit bleaker, that is a considerable expansion, even if it will not by itself cure Egypt's terrible poverty. Egypt's 27 million inhabitants--twice as many as when Nasser was born 46 years ago--are crammed into a mere 4% of the land. And the pinch gets tighter all the time: each year, 800,000 more Egyptians come into the world. The dam will not only ease this pressure by providing one-third more cultivable land, but with its hydroelectric plant will also triple Egypt's power output and cut power costs significantly.

The High Dam will accomplish all this by harnessing the Nile's flood--that annual, June-to-October inundation of silt and water that since the beginning of history has brought life and uncertainty to Lower Egypt. Not only does the rain-fed flood vary in volume year by year, producing the "seven fat years and seven lean years," but at best spills some 9 billion gallons of fresh water into the sea annually, often leaving Egypt's cash crops of cotton and cane thirsty between floods.

The High Dam will contain the flood behind its massive wall, allow water out of Lake Nasser when needed. After aeons of capriciousness, the Nile will have to take orders.

Response to Challenge. Rising from its twin sources in Ethiopia and East Africa, the longest river in the world begins its course 4,150 miles from the sea. Its longest leg, called the White Nile, pours out of Lake Victoria through Uganda's Owen Falls Dam, drops swiftly to the Sudan, where it snarls itself in the tangled vegetation of the Sudd--50,000 sq. mi. of swamp, amidst whose 14-ft.-papyrus thickets and convoluted blue ambatch flowers the river loses half its water in evaporation and drainage. The Blue Nile dashes headlong down the rain-wreathed mountains from Lake Tana, smoking through unnavigable gorges and scouring tons of rich earth from the Ethiopian highlands. Where the two meet at Khartoum, the darker tide of the Blue shoulders the White aside, bringing 84% of the system's total water volume into the resultant river.

From Khartoum to Aswan, the Nile runs through bleak desert. This is Nubia, the land of the Cush, of the mud-building Fung people, of temples and heat, where the Nile hurriedly bears its load of diluted loam over transverse ribs of crystalline rock, granite and diorite--the Six Cataracts. Below the Second Cataract, it skids through a 100-mile chute, the Batn el Hagar (Belly of Stones), studded with gleaming black islets. Then below Aswan it enters the Egypt of antiquity. Here the neolithic men of North Africa gathered as the grassy Saharan plains dried up into desert following the Ice Age, and here they acted out the first classic example, according to Historian Arnold Toynbee, of "response to challenge"--the challenge of the flood.

Levers & Virgins. Out of the ancient Egyptian attempts to tame the Nile floods developed the tools of civilization: a 365-day calendar to predict the coming of the flood; a crude astronomy to further refine forecasts; systems of accounting, and, ultimately, written language to handle the stores of grain needed to tide the society over the lean months between the floods; building implements like the wedge, the lever, the screw, the pulley, the inclined plane.

As the dynasties flourished and Egyptian culture inseminated Crete and Greece, great temples and pyramids rose along the Nile's banks at Giza, Karnak, Luxor, Thebes--clear up through Nubia. Each year, the flood climbed the bench marks of the Nilometers, and Egyptians thanked that most beneficent of gods, potbellied, Nile-green Hapi, the flood deity. To keep Hapi happy, the Egyptians threw bejeweled virgins into the river each year on the feast of Waffa el Nil (Aug. 22), which Nasser has vowed and pledged to preserve. Though Egypt's Arab conquerors put an end to human sacrifice 13 centuries ago in the name of Mohammed, Egyptians still throw elaborately costumed dolls into the Nile every year on the holiday. Still echoing through history are the hymns that the great Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, history's first known monotheist, composed in honor of his god:

How excellent are thy designs O lord of eternity! There is a Nile in the sky .

Work Is Pride. To stem the Nile on earth and to tame its flood, the Russian engineers directing the Aswan project settled on a two-stage construction plan. Choosing a site four miles above the already existing and inadequate Low Dam at the town of Aswan, they first cut a diversion channel through one bank of the Nile. This channel contains six long, Y-mouthed shafts cut through the rock and lined with cement to house a dozen 180,000-kw. turbines; with the aid of boosting generators, these will crank out the dam's annual 10 billion kw-h of power.

The rock removed in the cutting of the diversion channel meanwhile was dumped into the Nile proper, forming the foundation of the High Dam. Only when this 1,750-ft. cofferdam foundation was laid clear across the Nile could the diversion channel be opened. Last week's explosions accomplished this. The Nile, now held back by the cofferdam, turned slowly into the diversion channel, swooped into the six great turbine shafts (where one tardy worker was trapped and drowned), and re-emerged into the Nile below the dam site. With the Nile thus diverted from the main riverbed, work can proceed on stage two--the raising of the High Dam itself to its ultimate height of 364 ft., forming a flattened, inverted V more than two miles across.

No sooner did the Russians begin work on the first stage in January 1960 than they learned that the Nile is not the Volga. Aswan's temperatures reach 135DEG in the summer, and the river's east bank, where they chose to cut the diversion channel, is a lunar landscape of tortured volcanic granite. The slow, heavy Russian drills jammed. As the project slipped nearly a year behind-schedule because of Russian-equipment failures, Nasser ignored Moscow's objections and brought in outside help--light, rubberized Swedish drills, British-built tractors, crawlers, scrapers and dump trucks, which were soon roaring between loading tipples and dockside like Percherons among Arab donkeys.

Excavation quotas increased from 25,000 tons of rock a day to a Pharaonic 170,000 tons during last week's closing surge. Vast crews of Egyptian and Russian workers in four overlapping shifts put in 48 working hours a day, goaded by signs in Arabic that read "Work is Duty, Work is Honor, Work is Pride."

Though the Russians, despite their equipment failures, performed well under difficult conditions, the real "heroes of labor" on the Aswan job were the Egyptian fellahin. Swarming to the site in quest of the relatively high pay (up to $1.20 a day including overtime), the Egyptians often slept under tarpaulins that flapped in the blast-furnace desert wind, ate their rice and drank their syrupy tea mixed with sand. When blasting shocks crumpled a temporary dam above the diversion channel last July, and the onrushing Nile threatened 5,000 workers in the incompleted turbine shafts, thousands of fellahin swarmed in with sand and other fill, saved the whole project from disaster. An amazing spirit swept through the hot, dusty camp as D (for Diversion) Day neared. Drivers actually wept when their trucks broke down; Arab laborers swarmed in like ants when Soviet excavators halt ed for maintenance, toted tons of granite in baskets on their backs. More than 200 workers died in accidents.

Last Traces. The dam project already has changed the life of Upper Egypt. The once-sleepy resort of Aswan, where thin-blooded Edwardians and the Aga Khan wintered, has become a boom town; its population has effectively tripled in the past four years to 140,000. Steel mills, nucleonics plants, and vast chemical complexes that will provide fertilizer to replace the lost Nile silt, are rising in what the Cairo press calls "the Pittsburgh of Egypt." Four resort hotels, plus the Aswan Hilton currently abuilding, loom glassy and air-conditioned ("TV in every room") above the Old Cataract Hotel, where oldtimers still sip icy martinis on the veranda and watch the river ride by. The presence of the High Dam and the threatened antiquities above Aswan have bred a burgeoning tourist trade, and each day the 50-passenger hydrofoil Cleopatra roars up from Aswan at 30 m.p.h. to visit the historic sites that will soon be lost to mankind.

As it slowly fills, Lake Nasser will obliterate the last traces of one of his tory's richest archaeological deposits. Bone-dry Nubia, the "land of gold," over which black men and white bat tled for 50 centuries, will be drowned. Though the Nubians themselves once ruled all Egypt (750-656 B.C.), they were frequently the victims of invaders. The Pharaoh Snefru 4,600 years ago reported "Nubia hacked to pieces: 7,000 men and women, 200,000 cattle and sheep led away." Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks and British followed, leaving hundreds of monuments, temples, fortresses, churches and works of art buried in the sand or exposed along the sear Nile Banks.

Drowning the Past. As the dam deadline approached, two dozen archaeological teams from 14 countries swarmed over the land searching for last-minute finds. At least 23 of Nubia's major historical sites have been or will be res cued from the waters--some of them simply by being cut up and carted away. A West German engineering firm won a UNESCO contract to save the Upper River's most famous temple: the sandstone statuary and columns carved 3,000 years ago on the order of Pharaoh Ramses II at Abu Simbel, 180 miles above Aswan.

Already many lesser structures have gone under. The distinctive mud houses of some 50,000 Nubians, their walls of tobey (from which Spanish takes the word adobe) gaudily painted with symbols ranging from scorpions to flowering steamboats, dissolve and collapse as the Nile laps among them. Of 43 villages, 33 have already been evacuated, their citizens relocated in stone-and-cement villages replete with grocery markets and food-processing plants, at Kom Ombo, 40 miles north of Aswan. Many Nubians resent the move. Their culture, which survived waves of invaders from the Egyptians to the Turks, seems doomed to certain dilution in the new settlements. But as one Egyptian said: "What is left to us but to drown the past in order to save the future?"

* Corrupted into "Cheops" 2,400 year ago by the Greek historian Herodotus.

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