THE NILE DAM AND ITS RESULTS.

Motueka Star, Volume IV, Issue 165, 20 March 1903, Page 5

THE NILE DAM AND ITS RESULTS.

In the December " Idler" Mr F. Fayant wriies upon the great work of "Capcurincr the Nile's Golden Floods." He says : ° Without the Nile Egypt would be as barren as the Great Desert. With the great river, fertile Egypt is but an elongated oasis, a thin green line on eitherside of the stream from Alexandra up into the heart of Cen ral Africa. This thin green line in the days of theancients made Egypt the garden and granarv of the world. And tor thirty cen uries men have struggled to widen this iine. But all the mighty undertakings of the past—the building of dykes to bind the floods, the raising of great walls to hold them back, the digging of canals and basins to lead the water to the parched fields—have been but pigmy efforts compared to this last work, which, at a single stroke, increases the national wealth by

He tells very vividly of the labors of Sir Benjamin Baker, Sir Ernest Cassel, and also, ot Sir John Aird. in the buildin" oi the Assouan dam. which Lord Cromer estimates will increase the agricultural earning power of Egypt by ,£2,600,000 every year. When we recollect that the dam only cost some to build, the enormous value of the work can be more easily realised. Mr Fayeut gives some interesting conversations which he had with Sir E. Cassel and Sir B. Baker. The lau>r describing the natural difficulties to be overcome, says :

"We had n-> idea of the difficulties we were o meet. We were greatly hampered in the work at thebeginningbecause of the unce.tainties of the iiver bed. We had to crush one turbulent channel after another to enable our thousands of workmen to go down into the bed of the river to excavate for the foundations. This work had to be done at High Nile to enable us to begin excavating as soon as the Nile subside' 1 . In closing a channel we first threw ton alter ton of granite blocks into the cataract, and then we pitched in trainloads of rock, tr cks and all. Gradually the rubble mound ros • above the surface of the water. After the fl od had subsided we banked this rock vvcdl with many thousand bags of sand. What a task we had to get those bags ! We used 8.000,000, and we had to search all Europe for them. When the floods rose again we anxiously watched the excavation ditch protected by these walls of rock and sand bags. We had a score of great pumps ready fo draw out the water should it rush in, but so well had our sudds been constructed that two pumps were as many as we needed."

In addition to his description of the work of the dam, Mr Fayant points out the probability of the erection of cotton mills in Egypt to spin the Egyptian cotton. "It is cotton that makes modern Egypt a living land, for Egyptian cotton is known over the world as the best cotton grown." He wonders what will be the effect upon the Lancashire mills when to the growth of spinning in the Southern American States is aaded the establishment of an Egyptian spinning industry.