Cairo to Kisumu

Within a mile or so of the red granite quarries, out of which Pompey’s Pillar and the obelisks were taken by the ancient Egyptians, just below the island of Philæ, with its stone temples built ages ago to the Goddess Isis, far up the Nile valley, on the edge of Lower Nubia, I write these notes for my American readers. I am in the heart of the desert, seven hundred miles south of the Mediterranean Sea, at the point where the great river drops down over the first cataract. I have come here to describe the Aswan Dam, which the British built to harness the Nile and thereby save Egypt from famine.

We all look upon this as the oldest of rivers, but the Nile god of to-day has many new aspects. For ages he has been ramping and charging at his own sweet will, but he is now being harnessed and will have to work in the traces like an old plough mule. In the past he has been feeding his daughter Egypt or not, as he pleased. He has sometimes stuffed her to repletion, and at others has held back his supplies of water and mud, causing a famine. This was the case during the seven hungry years of Joseph’s time, and the fat years of that day were undoubtedly produced by high Niles. Such ups and downs have occurred in Egypt from time to time since the dawn of her history, and it is only in comparatively recent years that man has attempted to control the old river and by a system of dams hold back the waters and let them out over the farms as needed. To master the Nile has cost many millions of dollars which have gone into building the great barrages in the lower river, and more important than all, the mighty dam away up here at Aswan.

Egypt is almost rainless and the Nile gives both land and people their food and drink. I have already described some of the wonders of the stream and what it does for Egypt. It rises in Lake Victoria, in Central Africa, and drops a distance greater than the altitude of the highest of the Alleghanies before it flows into the Mediterranean Sea. In the upper part of its course it is known as the White Nile, and this should be called the main stream of the river. At Khartum, thirteen hundred and fifty miles from the Mediterranean, the Blue Nile, which rises in the Abyssinian Mountains, comes in, while about one hundred and forty miles farther north the Atbara, or Black Nile, which is also from Abyssinia, joins the main stream. From the mouth of the Atbara to the sea there is not a tributary of any kind connected with the river. It ploughs its way through the desert valley, in which it has built up Egypt, narrowing and widening, until a few miles below Cairo, where it divides into two great branches and flows off into the sea.

The volume of the Nile is enormous. At flood times, a billion tons of water go by at Aswan every day. The river then rises twenty-five feet at Cairo, thirty-eight feet at Old Thebes, and almost fifty feet at the first cataract, where I now am. There is so much water that no dam could hold it, hence all of these great works had to be made so that the water can be let in and out and allowed to pass through at will.

It is at flood time that the Nile valley gets its rich feed of Abyssinian mud. This is brought down in part by the Blue Nile, but more abundantly by the Atbara, or Black Nile. It is carried by the inundation all over Egypt and by means of irrigation conducted to nearly every farm. After the floods subside the muddy waters grow clear again. The Blue Nile and the Black Nile become almost dry, and the white water of the main, or Victoria Nile, is about all that Egypt has. It is this white water that is stored up by the Aswan Dam, and it feeds the country in much the same way as our irrigation canals do, with water only and not with a thick mixture of water and mud as in the times of the overflow.

For thousands of years these rivers have been pouring down through this Nile valley; but whenever the rains have been scanty in the highlands of Abyssinia and in Central Africa the main stream has not been high enough to reach the whole country. Most of the lands could be inundated only once a year, and if the Nile was especially low some could have no water at all. By the present system Egypt has water all the year round, and enough to make it produce two or three crops every twelve months.

I have been much interested in the irrigation works of the past. The whole of the Nile valley above Cairo is cut up into a series of basins. For six hundred or seven hundred miles north of this point the valley slopes very gradually and, in order to save the water, dikes have been made across it and embankments run parallel with the river, turning the whole country into a series of basin-like terraces, each containing from five thousand to fifteen thousand acres. These basins, which are often subdivided, are so connected that the water flows from one to the other until it finally passes out of the lower basin back into the Nile. When the floods come, the lowest basins are filled first and then those higher up, until at last all have become great ponds and Egypt is one vast inland sea cut up by the embankments and islands upon which the villages stand.

There are many such systems of basins in Upper Egypt, some large and some small. There are also basins higher up and closer to the river which are filled with sakiebs or shadoofs. When I tell you that the fall of this valley from here to Cairo is only seven inches to the mile you will see how carefully these basins must be graduated in order to take advantage of the flow of the river. They have to be so constructed that the water can be drained off as rapidly as it is let on. As I have already said, the Abyssinian mud contains a great quantity of salts, and it is just as bad to have too much of it as too little. If the land is over-watered the salts dissolve from the soil, the over-soaked land becomes wormy, and the crops are often sown too late. The red water, or that containing the silt, is allowed to stand just about forty days. During this time it drops a great deal of sediment and furnishes enough moisture for the crops.

But the Aswan Dam has so regulated the river flow that the Egyptian farmer is far less at the mercy of low Niles or high Niles than in the past. The dam is one of the wonders of modern Egypt. It is in full sight of me as I sit here on the left bank of the Nile, with the desert at my back. It looks like a great stone viaduct crossing the rocky bed of the river, joining the stony hills which wall the Nile on both sides, and holding back a portion of its mighty waters. It is a huge granite barrier a mile and a quarter long. There is now a roadway guarded by walls on its top, and there is a miniature railway, the cars of which are pushed by men from one end to the other. The dam serves as a bridge as well, and donkeys, camels, and men are allowed to pass over it from bank to bank. I crossed on the car at a cost of twenty-five cents, my motive power being two Arab boys who trotted behind.

As I came over, I stopped from time to time to examine the construction. The dam is made of big blocks of red granite as fine as that of any tombstone in the United States. They are beautifully cut, and fitted as closely as the walls of a palace. On the upper side or south face the wall is perpendicular, forming a straight up-and-down barrier against the waters of the Nile. I climbed down a ladder on that side at one place almost to the river, and could see that the blocks are fitted so closely that the cement does not show. The masonry seems almost one solid stone throughout, with the exception of where the great sluices are cut, to allow the river to flow through at the times of the flood, and as the floods subside to shut back the waters to form the reservoir for the dry season.

There are one hundred and eighty of these sluice gates in the dam, each of which has steel doors that can be raised or lowered to allow the whole river to flow through or to hold back as much or as little as the engineers will. The dam is thus a great stone wall pierced by these gates.

The Nile never flows over the top of the dam, but always through the gates and the canal at one side. When the gates are closed during the dry season, enough water is held back by this structure of steel and granite to form a lake over one hundred miles long, and this is let out as needed to supplement the ordinary flow of the river and give the crops plenty of water all summer through. There is water enough in the reservoir to give all the families of the United States all they could use for four or five months, and enough to supply Great Britain and Ireland the entire year.

The weight of this water is stupendous and its force inconceivable. Nevertheless, during the floods fully as much runs through the dam every day as the whole supply kept back during the dry season; and the structure had to be made so that it would retain this huge lake and at flood time let a lake equal to it pass through.

Talk about the Pyramids! The Aswan Dam is far more wonderful than they are. The Pyramid of Cheops required one hundred thousand men and over twenty years in its building. The Aswan Dam was constructed by about eleven thousand men in four years. The Pyramid of Cheops was made by forced labour and impoverished the people. The Aswan Dam cost about twelve million dollars and the men who worked upon it were better paid than any others who had ever laboured in the valley of the Nile. Moreover, the dam has meant prosperity for Egypt. It has added to it more than one million five hundred thousand acres of tillable land and has increased the value of its crops by over thirteen million dollars per annum. It has more than paid for its cost every year. Since it has been built the yearly tax revenues have gained by two million dollars, and the lands owned by the government have become worth five million dollars more.

The dam is also more wonderful than the Pyramids in its construction. Old Cheops is built on the edge of the desert on a solid stone platform, and is little more than the piling of one stone upon another. For the Aswan Dam a trench a hundred feet wide and a hundred feet deep had to be excavated in the granite rock. This was bedded with concreted rubble to form the substructure upon which the masonry was raised. The dam itself contains more than a million tons of granite and about fifteen thousand tons of steel, and the calculations of the engineers are so exact that they know just how much every ounce of stone and steel will hold back.

I have had some talks here with the engineer-in-chief of the dam, and am surprised at the wonderful intelligence bureau that has been created in connection with the control of the Nile. Its officials know the exact weight of the river at every hour of the day. They have telegraphic reports on what the Nile is doing in Abyssinia, in Central Africa, and in the Sudan. They have dispatches as to every great rain, and they know to a ton just how fast Lower Egypt is using the water, so they can tell how much or how little to let out for the farms. They even estimate the force of the sun on the water and know how much it drinks up every day. When the reservoir is full Old Sol takes a million and a half tons from it every twenty-four hours. They know what the evaporation is, not only at Aswan, but all along the great stream and throughout its swamps to its source in Lake Victoria.

I am also amazed at the strength and delicacy of the machinery of this remarkable structure. The great sluice gates are each as high as a two-story house, and so wide that you could drive a hay wagon through them without touching the walls. They are cut right through the granite dam and are closed or opened by steel doors, which slide up and down inside the wall on rollers. Upon the top of the dam there are machines for moving these gates, so made that a child could operate them. They are equipped to be operated by electricity, but they are now worked by hand, and this mighty force, so tremendous that two billion horses would be required to move it, is now controlled at will by the muscular power of a single man.

This thought was impressive as I sat below the dam, where the eight central sluices pressed by the millions of tons of water lying behind them poured forth their mighty flood. I had climbed down the steps at the north side of the centre of the dam to make a photograph of the streams flowing through. They come forth with a rush like that of Niagara and go foaming over the rocks with a force that might generate thousands of horsepower. The noise is like thunder and the torrents fairly shake the earth. Each is about fifteen feet in height and yellow with mud. There were eight such streams of golden foam at my right, and farther over I could see the spray from others all dashing through the dam until they met in a yellow frothing mass several hundred feet below me and rolled onward down the rocks to Egypt. They flow out with such a force that they tear up the rocky bed of the Nile, lifting stones weighing many tons and carrying them some distance down the river. They have done so much damage of this nature that a cement foundation has now been made below the dam itself in order to prevent the gouging out of the bed which would mean the undermining of the main structure.

But the thirsty land and its teeming millions forever clamour for more water. Even this great Aswan Dam has not nearly solved the irrigation problem of Egypt. There are always too many would-be farmers for the watered area. At the present rate of growth, it is estimated, the population will have increased by the middle of the century to twenty millions of people, practically all of them dependent on agriculture, and so on this one river system. The government has yet more ambitious schemes for hoarding and meting out its precious waters.

At Wady Halfa, about two hundred miles up the river from Aswan, begins the Sudan, which extends for thousands of miles southward. In controlling this vast territory, Great Britain has hold also of the upper reaches of the Nile from the south boundary of Egypt proper into the Great Lakes of Central Africa where the river has its source. The irrigation works, new dams, and reservoirs planned or building on the Upper Nile are intended to increase the arable lands not only in the Sudan but in Egypt as well. The projects which the British have for the improvement of the Nile will rank as the most daring of the engineering plans of the century. To carry them out will cost as much as the Suez Canal, but they will build up fifteen hundred or two thousand miles south of the Mediterranean Sea, several other Egypts twice or thrice as rich as the lower Nile valley, each supporting its millions of people.

The projects include schemes for the regulation of the Great Lakes on the highlands of Central Africa, to make them serve as reservoirs for the Nile. They include, also, plans for the embankment of the tributaries of the White Nile flowing through the great swamps on the northern slope of the Congo watershed, and the digging of over two hundred miles of new channel, whereby the main stream of the White Nile will be greatly shortened and its bed fitted to carrying the enormous volume of its waters down to Khartum. Another scheme contemplates the erection of a dam at Lake Tsana, on the highlands of Abyssinia, which will make that lake a reservoir for the Blue Nile and enable it to water the fertile plain which lies between the Blue and White Niles, ending at Khartum.

The great trouble now is that a large part of the waters of the Nile go to waste, particularly in the swamps of the Sudd region. These mighty swamps lie on the northern slope of the Congo watershed and are fed by the branches of the White Nile known as the Bahr el Jebel, the Bahr el Ghazal, and the Bahr el Zaraf. They begin where the River Sobat flows into the Nile and form an irregular triangle, the base running from that point two hundred miles westward, with the southern apex at Bor, which is two or three hundred miles farther south. They lie on the bed of what in prehistoric times was a great lake, and are composed of masses of reeds, papyrus, and other swamp grasses, so interlaced that they soak up the water like a huge sponge. Imagine a sponge as big as the State of Indiana, from two to six feet in thickness, and so situated that it is always filled by the waters of the Nile and you will have some idea of this region. This sponge is near the Equator where the tropical sun beats down upon it, so that steam is always rising. It sucks up the waters of the Nile and gives them out into the air. The evaporation in the Sudd and along the courses of the Nile is so great that an amount equal to half the capacity of the Aswan reservoir is lost every day. In the summer fully fifty per cent. of the water supplied by the Great Lakes never gets into the main stream of the Nile. The water of this swamp is nowhere much above a man’s head, and in most places, except where the main stream flows through, it is only waist-deep. The evaporation increases at the time of the flood, when more land is covered, so that no matter how much water flows into the swamp, only about the same amount flows out.

The vast masses of floating weeds break up and burst into the channels, and when an obstruction is encountered they pile up on one another just as ice does. In the hot, dry season, when the stems of the papyrus are ten or fifteen feet high, the natives start fires which sweep the region from end to end, destroying all other vegetation. The ashes and burnt stems add to the floating mass, which after a time becomes five or six feet in thickness and almost like peat.

In clearing this Sudd and reopening the channels, the first step is to cut down the vegetation. The sponge-like mass is then cut with long saws into blocks, much as ice is harvested on our ponds. The blocks are pulled out into the current by steel cables attached to the engines on the steamers and float down the stream. An immense deal of this kind of work is going on all along the Upper Nile, for it is only in this way that navigation is kept open.

I have met some of the surveyors who are breaking a way through the Sudd. They describe it as a vast sheet of brilliant green made up of papyrus, feathery reeds, and sword grass. These rise from five to fifteen feet above the water and are broken here and there by patches of ambatch trees and by channels, pools, and lagoons. The greater part of the region has no human inhabitants, especially that along the Bahr el Ghazal.

Big game is to be seen only to the south of the swamp area. There the land is a little higher, and elephants, giraffes, and buffaloes inhabit the edges of the swamps. In the heart of it, in fact, in all parts of it, there are vast numbers of hippopotami, and there are all sorts of swamp birds everywhere. From the reeds and the mud banks clouds of wild cranes, geese, storks, herons, pelicans, and ducks of every description rise up as the boats approach, and there are insects by millions—mosquitoes, moths, spiders, and flies. There are other insects that carry fevers, and the tsetse fly, which causes the sleeping sickness.

When all the Upper Nile plans and projects have been put through, the whole river will indeed be a magically powerful, yet tamed and harnessed, domestic animal at the command of the farmers of a greater Egypt and a greater Sudan.